Vox Samples has just released Pitchmunk, a freeware pitch shifter plugin for Windows and Mac (64-bit).
I have to admit that I am not up to date when it comes to pitch shifters. I make fiddly electronic music, so vocals aren’t usually in my wheelhouse.
If I have to keep to a pitch, Melodyne is there just in case. Pitch shifters as effects can lead to some sonic mayhem, which can produce interesting results.
However, Vox Samples has you covered with Pitchmunk, a decidedly simple take on the humble pitch shifter.
You’ve got a few more controls than the usual Vox Samples releases. The pitch and formant controls are the main draw, but there’s also a filter, drive and mix knob.
Pitch allows you to shift from 2 octaves up to 2 octaves down, an astonishing 48 semitones or so. You can’t tune it in cents or hertz, but that’s fine with me.
The formant control has a follow option, which allows your tweaks to stick closer to the assigned pitch. You can also turn it off, which makes for some interesting creative effects.
The filter seems to be a typical low-pass affair. It’s not resonant or anything fancy, although perhaps it should be. Instead, it just does what you would expect a filter to do. It cleans up any annoying highs to make them fit your mix better.
The drive works well and gets a bit harsh at higher values. I always love to see a mix knob, regardless of the intended effect. I love running things in parallel, and it saves me the hassle of setting up sends and returns.
I can’t speak with any real authority on how this works with vocals. I found it worked quite well for random public-domain samples. I could quickly make things sound strange and alien by turning off the formant follow control.
If you often work with vocals, though, I think Pitchmunk is definitely worth a try. It seems to be a useful freeware alternative to plugins like Little AlterBoy and Waves Vocal Bender.
Have you tried any other pitch shifter plugins? Feel free to share your favorites in the comments below.
As with all Vox Samples releases, you can use it on both Windows and Mac computers. Supported plug-in formats are VST3 and AU. The little chipmunk looks pretty trustworthy too, so it’s worth a download.
Download: Pitchmunk (FREE)
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Last Updated on March 26, 2024 by Tomislav Zlatic.
