Glitch Shifter

GlitchShifter is an experiment that went horribly right.

The idea behind this one was to produce a pitch shifter which would scan for crossover points, so that it could just splice bits of audio without crossfading or anything of the sort.

Unfortunately or fortunately, the attempt created a monster.

Glitch Shifter can be ‘controlled’ by the top two sliders, the first one for altering sound diatonically and the second, free-form. Those set the pitch (up only: didn’t work out the opposite, but pitch lowering is easier with normal tools).

Then, there’s Tightness, Feedback and Dry/Wet. Tightness is the one that needs explaining, though Feedback and Dry/Wet are important for making craziness. Tightness works like this: crank it out, and Glitch Shifter is FORCED to track exactly with the input signal. That’ll cause it to glitch out horribly, because it’s got no freedom to wander searching for an edit point.

As you lower Tightness, Glitch Shifter casts a wider net in its search for splices. The splices get smoother and smoother… but the little chunks of audio get bigger and more out of sync. You’ll begin getting stutter effects, unpredictable jumps which can break up words and coherence on the input. Low Tightness on Glitch Shifter means a fluid but nonsensical output, possibly with wild robotic stammering, but all in lovely clear pitch-shifted audio.

Some types of audio can give you an almost convincing pitch shift with a lot of tonal clarity. Others give a crazy mess of choppy madness. Or you can mis-set it for buffer-override types of pitched stuttering and random chipmunk echo, or the other way for harsh grinding robotic effects. You might even get it to act like a pitch shifter!

One of the greats, if you like sonic digital craziness.