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 | | | | Nov30Written by:Rip Rowan
Tuesday, November 30, 1999 6:00 PM  UltraPitch is a pitch shifter plug-in that comes in three lovely flavors: single-voice, three-voice, and six voice.
UltraPitch is a full formant-correcting harmonizer. That means it detects the pitch of a note and shifts only the note, leaving the harmonics (formant) intact. This creates a more realistic result. UltraPitch also includes the ability to modify the formant, leaving the pitch intact. This can be used to make masculine voices more feminine or to change the harmonic content of an instrument.
 UltraPitch
UltraPitch seems to have been developed with the idea of using it as an honest-to-God pitch shifter that can be used to make one person's voice sound like four-part harmony, or to shift a person's voice up or down a few notes. You may be one of those people that think that the purpose of a pitch shifter is to create complex and realistic vocal harmonies. I don't. My philosophy is that if you want to create the Beach Boys or Crosby Stills Nash and Young, you need to be able to sing, and get busy multitracking. And if you need the voice to be a fourth higher, then you need to retrack the vocal. I've heard vocal processors that sounded "interesting" but never "real."
So I spent very little time using UltraPitch as a vocal harmonizer. For one thing, even if it was so accurate that your ears couldn't hear the effect, to really use UltraPitch as a vocal harmonizer you need the ability to automate the plug-in and tell it how to structure the chords. I can imagine that this would be possible using the automatable TDM version of this plug-in, but of course, you can't automate DirectX plugins (anyone listening out there)? Suffice to say that for some voices, UltraPitch can do a pretty good job of creating fixed harmonic structures, but let's face it, vocals just sound better when they're actually sung.
But most people that I know with harmonizers use them to layer and stack vocals, which is what I would use UltraPtich for. Some vocalists just have the hardest time doing a stacked vocal, and if all you're trying to do is add a little texture, a harmonizer can do a bang-up job. So I decided to approach UltraPitch from this point of view.
Unfortuantely, UltraPitch is not without a few serious problems that affect it usefulness as a track insert. I started out by trying UltraPitch on some soloed vocal tracks in Cakewalk v.9. Immediately I noticed that the track was seriously delayed, by almost a quarter note. So I fired up Vegas and found out that UltraPitch will crash Vegas every time it's opened. In fact I tried UltraPitch in Sound Forge and Acid and it immediately crashed both of them too.
After speaking with Waves technical support on this issue I learned that the tremendous latency present in UltraPitch can cause problems with some recording software. The solution is to increase the number of audio buffers in the recorder. This solved the crashing problem in Sound Forge but not Vegas. So now the plug-in works, but when used as a track insert, there's still this terrible latency problem. The only way to solve the time delay problem is to offset the track. Fortunately the editing programs that I use allow you to offset the audio, and after setting the track back 8192 samples, the output was dead on.
I also discovered an occasional bug in the software that caused the error message, "This library is missing Dilbert, and will not function" followed by a full system crash.Dilbert?? It seems we are still living in the word of useless, cryptic, annoying error messages. I was able to reproduce this error message and crash in both Sound Forge and Cakewalk. Of the two-hundred-plus plug-ins I own, this is the only one I use that causes such a serious problem.
The single-voice version of UltraPitch is used to shift a sound source up or down in pitch, whereas the three and six-voice versions do not shift the source note, but rather create either three or six additional voices of various pitches. Therefore the user interface for the single-voice varies slightly from that of the three and six-voice versions. The graphic shows the six-voice version. The single-voice version lacks the left-third of the UI which deals with how the various voices are mixed and panned.
Like SuperTap, UltraPitch has a great user interface. The Voice Character window lets you control how the base frequency is shifted by moving the marker up or down, and how the formant is shifted (if at all) by moving the marker left or right. A transfer function line can be used to control the dependency of the formant on the pitch.
Let me explain. When a "normal" woman sings, no matter how low she sings, she still sounds like a woman. But if you take a husky alto and get her to sing really low, you'll discover that the lower she goes, the more she starts sounding male. Similarly, the attack and harmonics of a bass guitar are generally all alike, until you start to go lower and lower, and then the attack becomes less metallic and more round.
UltraPitch offers a number of preset formant transfer functions to control the relationship of the formant to the pitch. I found this to be a powerful feature that created much more lifelike shifts.
There's other cool things you can do with the formants. For example, you can create the illusion of a group of singers signing in unison by setting up three to six voices, and altering their formants. The result is a set of chorused voices ranging in timbre from masculine to feminine. This was a reasonably convincing effect that could be effectively used to create the illusion of "a bunch of singers all singing along."
A Pitch Detection window offers a scrolling pitch graph that shows the approximate frequency of the detected note. You can adjust the tracking range using a pair of controls on the Pitch Detection window. This helps UltraPitch to know which frequencies to track, and which ones to ignore. A mode setting also lets you tell UltraPitch what kind of input it's tracking, which helps the software to understand the nature of the harmonics it's hearing. By tweaking these settings, UltraPitch really does a good job of locking onto the pitch.
I was able to use the single-voice version to do some cool pitch shifting of a baritone guitar. I took the bari guitar down an octave to create a bass line. Controlling the formant let me change the texture of the guitar to create either an electric bass type sound, or an acoustic bass type sound. Using the range controls on the pitch detector, as well as setting the mode to music really helped. The output was rich and fat, and pitch tracking was quite stable.
Finally, in the three- and six-voice versions, each voice has its own volume, rotation, and delay control. The Pan Mix window works just like the one in SuperTap: each voice has its own color-coded dot which can be dragged around to adjust Pan (Rotation) and Gain. An "Animation" control is provided that slightly randomizes the delay of each voice, creating a more organic effect (why doesn't SuperTap have an Animation control?)
By setting up three to six voices, each with a little delay and a little pitch adjustment (up or down a few cents), rich lush layered sounds can be created. I used this "ultra-lush spreading" effect very well on a sampled string sound. By spreading out the voices in space with Rotation and Delay, and by cranking up the Animation, the dry, "in your face" string sample was made much softer and more organic, without sounding overly chorusy.
You can, of course, use UltraPitch to create up to seven-part harmonies (the original note plus six other notes), but as with other harmonizers, the effect is pretty mechanical. You could use the harmonizer to create synthetic, vocoder-like speech, but I don't think anyone's going to be fooled into thinking there's really seven singers. However, I do think the harmonizing effect is a pretty cool kind of mod for electronica loops. If you're into looping, you'll have fun with UltraPitch.
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