Pitch Shifter

If you need a treadle-controlled pitch shifter for dive bombs, octave-up leads, or detuned textures, Super Whammy is the closest match on the device. It uses a phase vocoder for smooth glissando on single-note lines, with configurable endpoints and a dry blend.

Our pick: Super Whammy

Super Whammy is a phase vocoder pitch shifter with continuous expression control. Set First and Last to your endpoints (e.g. 0 to +12 for an octave up), map your expression pedal to Step, and sweep between them. A Clean blend lets you mix dry signal with the shifted signal. Fidelity trades latency for quality — lower values give more glitchy character, higher values are smoother.

On single-note lines the glissando is clean and smooth. On chords the phase vocoder smears transients — a different character from the original pedal's pitch-tracking confusion, but usable for texture.

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Also great: Drop

Drop uses the same phase vocoder engine as Super Whammy, but voiced as a drop-tuner: Step goes from 0 to -12 semitones. No dry blend, no octave-up range. Use it if you only need a fixed downward shift and don't need the clean mix.

What you give up: No octave-up range, no dry blend, less flexible endpoint control.

Also considered

MaPitchshift is a granular delay-line shifter with a continuous ratio control covering ±2 octaves. The grains are free-running (not period-locked), so on monophonic input it's smooth but lacks the "intelligent" tracking of a pitch detector. Good fallback if the phase vocoder's CPU cost is too high.

AM pitchshifter is a dual-read-pointer delay-line shifter — the cheapest and glitchiest of the set. On chords it stutters as the crossfade hits discontinuities. Low CPU, intentionally lo-fi. Use it for a deliberately broken dive effect.

Pitchotto is a dual-voice granular shifter limited to ±1 octave. Designed for shoegaze detuned-double textures, not dramatic dives. Pretty for ambient, not a Whammy stand-in.

TAP Pitch Shifter is not a pitch shifter at all — it's a 3-tap delay-line phase modulator producing vibrato/chorus at 6 Hz. No static pitch shift, no treadle control. Wrong effect entirely.

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