There is no such thing as an analog Pitch Shifter. At least as far as I know. I suppose one could be built if you could find a charge coupled bucket brigade type device capable of high enough quality, but that's unlikely. All pitch shifters are digital and break the incoming signal into samples just like digital delays. There are always trade offs involved in making a pitch shifter as well, as improved pitch accuracy and improved timing accuracy are somewhat mutually exclusive. I think what you are really looking for is a pitch shifter which can accept a control voltage to control the amount that the signal is shifted in pitch. This is also difficult to accomplish. Most Digital Delay devices which are capable of analog voltage control actually step between delay values rather than continuously changing value. This tends to cause zipper noise. In order to vary the delay (or the pitch) continuously the sample rate clock must be voltage controlled. While not impossible, this is quite difficult. If you are sampling at 48 kHz which would give you a maximum input frequency of around 20 kHz, and then you wanted to either decrease the delay time or raise the pitch by two octaves, your sample rate clock would now be running at 192 kHz. If you slow down below 48 kHz you will lose high end response or generate some truly nasty artifacts, so the effective range is only about 2 octaves using modern converters if you want to be continuously variable without stepping. It may be possible to get more range with a delta/sigma scheme or by using a flash converter with a compander. This is something I'm personally interested in exploring, as I'm interested in the musical applications of delay lines, but I haven't had time to play around with any kind of circuit design yet. The frequency shifter is another animal entirely. The Encore Electronics module is quite wonderful, but as someone else pointed out a frequency shifter does not maintain the integer spacing of harmonics present in the input signal, so it really does not shift pitch.
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Re: Pitch Shifter
2004-12-27 by paulhaneberg
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