Creating harmonies with pitch shifting

We explore a way to create a polyphonic, ethereal pad sound from a monophonic synth part

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We start with a basic plucked sound from NI’s Kontour, playing simple arpeggiated steps. We send this to a long reverb from UVI’s Sparkverb which adds a warm bed behind the lead sound.

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We set up a second auxiliary, and onto this we insert Soundtoys’ Crystallizer. We set the mix to 100% Wet and the Pitch to 1200, to produce an octave-up pitchshift. We set both Splice and Delay to eighthnotes. We send this Auxiliary to the reverb Aux too.

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This works nicely but it dominates too much. So we pan the sound -40 (to the left) and drop the Auxiliary return fader to -11dB to blend the octave Crystallizer effect more subtly under the original part.

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We create a similar effect via a second Auxiliary. This time, we offset pitch +700 cents in Crystallizer, which equates to a fifth above the original pitch. This creates a richer cloud of sound, especially as there are now two pitchshifted treatments playing together.

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We create a third treatment, with an offset of +300 cents, to produce a minor third. Even with the levels of the second and third pitch offsets blended, these don’t sound quite right. Something is clashing in the pitchshifted treatments.

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This is due to the Recycle amount in Crystallizer. With Recycle levels higher, more pitches are added. If the trigger note is a C, the first pitch-offset will be a G. With Recycle boosted, we hear D, A, E and B (the subsequent 5ths) too. These clash, so things sound better when Recycle levels are dropped.