PitchFactor Part 2

When we last left off I was jamming with PitchFactor and a drum machine. I had fun, and ultimately I had a recording of some wacky drums; but I had to go on testing, and on testing I went.

A couple days later was one of those perfect summer days where it's just warm enough that you want to wear flip flops, but not so hot that you go shopping for stuff you don't need just to get some A/C. So the wife and I headed to Washington Square Park to sit on a bench. While she read, I took the recording on my laptop and started finding and chopping out the sections I liked. It was kind of slow going, but it was a nice day, and I was having fun.

After I sorted and labeled a fairly large number of 1, 2, and 4 bar loops I started loading them into Live and cutting them up and re-arranging them. Here is what I ended up with:



I love Live for this sort of arranging, it's interface is incredibly quick for making all kinds of stutter edits and time-stretch effects. What I'll usually do is open 2 audio tracks, import all the loops into the first one then grab them and arrange them in the second one. I'll keep the first one muted and just use it as a depot for the unused audio.

At that point it was fairly easy to start throwing synths and things in there, I grabbed some samples and some softsynths and started playing with things that would work together. I might go back and go into that process a little more at some point, but I wanted to give you a sense of how the drums fit into the context of the song once I started building up around them.



There are still some things I want to do to this track, but then I'll mix it and hopefully it'll be part of an upcoming Transit161 release.

Hope You Enjoyed It,
Dan

PitchFactor

So since I get to design plug-ins, guitar pedals, and rack gear all day, I get to spend a lot of time playing with and testing new effects. I've been spending most of the last 6 months on a product we just announced called PitchFactor which is a guitar pedal that has pitch shifting delays along with it's other goodies. While I was testing at home one day, I got bored with the usual guitar input and decided to fire up the trusty old Korg ES-1 and run some drums through the PitchFactor to see what I could see.

I started with a drum pattern:



As I've already mentioned, I love distorted drums, so I patched the ES-1 into a Epiphone Valve Jr -> Weber dummy load I have wired into the patch bay to get this sound:



Then finally patched the PitchFactor in between the two and started tweaking...



As you can hear, I had a lot of fun. This is all from the HarModulator effect, which includes 2 pitchshift voices with feedback delays and modulation. This allowed me to sweep the pitch with the pitch knobs, create stutter effects with the delay and feedback, and pan between all those sounds with the various mix controls. Tomorrow I'll show you what I did with the output of this jam and the song that resulted from it.

Till Next Time,
Dan