Pitch Monster £80

Web deviousmachines.com Format PC/Mac, VST/AU/AAX

A multi-purpose pitchshifter, harmoniser and granular processor, Pitch Monster wants to be your first port of call for the creative processing of vocals and other signals. The big Pitch dial in the middle shifts the input upwards by up to two octaves or down by up to four, either snapped to semitones or cents, and using one of three selectable engines: Granular (rateadjustable micro-slicing), Formant (male/female transformation, etc) or Vocoder (snaps to a fixed pitch for MIDI play – see below). Up to eight unison voices can be added, splayed in frequency and timing by the Pitch and Time Spread controls, and activating Jitter for either of these introduces a degree of granular randomness to proceedings. The Wide button offsets the left and right channels for serious stereo breadth, and the combination low/high/ band-pass filter is just the thing for narrowing the frequency range down if required.

Pitch Monster can operate as a regular audio effect, or be ‘played’ with a MIDI keyboard, shifting pitch relative to that of the input signal in Granular and Formant modes, or absolutely in Vocode mode. Alternatively, the awesome Chord mode enables eight chords of up to eight notes each to be stored for real-time switching, and includes a massive library of preset chords in a wide variety of keys and modes. Our only gripe is that the slots themselves aren’t MIDIassignable, although they are visible to the host DAW as an automation target.

Pitch Monster is, as you’d expect, most at home working on vocals, with which there really is no end to the range and variety of harmonising, robotising, granulating, genderbending, melodising and wobbling things you can do with it. However, any pitched source material is fair game, and hours are easily lost imposing it on synths, guitars, found sounds and percussion. Monstrous. n9/ 10n