5 Creative Uses for Pitch Shifting Plugins

Want to harness the full power of your pitch shifting plugins? We take a deep dive on the effect, and how you can use it to elevate your productions.

Pitch shifting plugins are commonplace in music production and sound engineering, with their most common use case being to transpose the pitch of an audio signal. What many people don’t realize is that pitch shifting plugins, such as ELASTIQUE PITCH V2, have numerous creative uses too. In this article, we’ll define pitch shifting before demonstrating five innovative ways to use pitch shifting plugins in your next project.

What is Pitch Shifting in Audio?

Pitch shifting refers to the process of adjusting the pitch of a piece of audio. Pitch shifting is commonly confused with frequency shifting, despite them being two different processes. In frequency shifting, all frequencies are shifted by the same amount. In pitch shifting however, frequencies are shifted by a factor, and therefore retain their harmonic relationship with one another. For this reason, pitch shifting is generally preferred if you want to preserve the tonal quality of an audio signal.

Creative Uses for Pitch Shifting Plugins

Without further ado, let’s explore pitch shifting a little deeper. These five uses for pitch shifting come courtesy of music producer, educator and Ableton Certified Trainer, Matt Tinkler. We recently sponsored a video on the subject of pitch shifting and pitch correction, and we’ve summarised some of the key techniques covered below. We highly recommend checking out his video in full if you want to level-up your pitch shifting know-how.

1. Instantly Change the Vibe of Your Vocals

This first technique is arguably the first thing most people think of when we talk about pitch-shifting plugins. Whatever style of music you’re working with, adjusting a vocal’s pitch can give it an entirely new vibe. Pitch it down for a deeper, darker feel, or pitch it up for a lighter, chipmunk-esque effect.

In his video, Matt demonstrates how ELASTIQUE PITCH V2 allows you to unlink the Pitch and Timbre controls for even more sonic possibilities. In the case of ELASTIQUE PITCH V2, you can think of the Timbre control as similar to the formant control often found in other plugins.

He also explains that if you’re looking for a natural pitch-shifting sound, it’s best to keep the Pitch and Timbre controls linked. This is because in the real world, the pitch and formant of someone’s voice are related to one another.

2. Add Stereo Width with Timbre-shifted Layers

As mentioned above, ELASTIQUE PITCH V2 allows you to adjust the timbre or formant of an audio signal, independent of the pitch. This can be used to create a unique sense of stereo width that stands out from the usual stereo widening plugins and techniques.

To achieve this, you can create duplicate audio tracks, pan them in opposite directions, and apply different processing to each, as Matt does in the video. Alternatively, you can route the dry audio signal to multiple return channels with different instances of your pitch-shifting plugin. In this case, we’ve created multiple chains within an Ableton Live Audio Effect rack, as this helps to keep our project nice and tidy.

3. Alter the Tone of Instruments and Drums

Next up, we’re using ELASTIQUE PITCH V2’s Timbre control on a single audio channel to change the tone of instruments and drums. As we discussed earlier, most people immediately associate pitch shifting effects with vocals, but its uses go far beyond the human voice.

In his video, Matt manually modulates ELASTIQUE PITCH V2’s Timbre control on a lead vocal, before applying the same processing to a guitar and arpeggiated synth. While the pitch stays the same, the overall tone of the audio signal can change drastically. While it’s not mentioned in the video, you can even apply timbre-shifting to a drum part, drum bus, or breakbeat.

This is a great way of placing various instruments within their own frequency ranges while mixing. If your hi-hats are too bright, try reducing the Timbre, or if your synth or guitar needs to cut through the mix a bit more, try increasing the timbre.

4. Create Unique Rhythmic Effects with Pitched Delays

While some of the techniques covered in this article are possible with almost any pitch-shifting plugin, this next one is only possible with a plugin like ELASTIQUE PITCH V2, which has an inbuilt delay effect and feedback control.

Place ELASTIQUE PITCH V2 on a return channel, and send to it the channel that you want to effect. As Matt notes in the video, this technique works best on atonal sounds such as drums and FX, but we encourage you to experiment with it to find interesting new sounds.

Now increase the Feedback control to around 30% to introduce the pitched delays. You can now begin to experiment with the Delay, Pitch, and Timbre controls to find new rhythmic textures and pitched patterns. Once you increase the feedback above 50%, you’ll begin to notice the pitched delay feeding back into itself. You can leave the delay unsynced for more unpredictable results, or put it in Sync mode for a delay effect that remains in time with your project.

5. Apply an Ethereal Shimmer Delay with +12 Semitones of Pitch Shifting

This final technique is an advancement on the previous one, which uses a few specific settings to achieve the desired sound. Start by setting up your routing in the same way, with ELASTIQUE PITCH V2 on a return channel and the channel that you want to affect being sent to it.

Then, turn the Pitch and Timbre controls all the way up to +12 Semitones, place the inbuilt delay in Sync mode, and increase the Feedback. You’ll start to hear a glistening, shimmering effect as ELASTIQUE PITCH V2 introduces delays that are an octave higher than its input and each repeat of the delay.

Find new tones by unlinking the Pitch and Timbre controls, leaving the Pitch control at +12 semitones and reducing the Timbre control. You can also add an even greater sense of space by placing your favourite reverb before or after ELASTIQUE PITCH V2 on the return channel.

Want to Know Five More Creative Uses for Pitch Shifting Plugins?

We’ll be back in the future with five more creative uses for pitch-shifting plugins. In the meantime, we hope this article has encouraged you to experiment with pitch shifting in exciting new ways. If you want to try out the techniques covered in this article, add ELASTIQUE PITCH V2 to your plugin collection now.