Now that we've had the final release for a little bit, a bunch of people tested the public beta, and there seems to have been extensive testing of the private betas, does anyone have any tips or tricks to get a clean pitch shifted down tone to sound as natural as possible? I did more testing last night with the chords mode and Pitch Tracking at 10, but I'm still struggling to mask the glitchiness when you, e.g., play an arpeggio in 8th notes, or if you play dissonant intervals.
What I'm trying to ascertain is if I'm hitting the limits of what the pitch block can do or if there's something I'm missing. I've read Cliff's notes about the shifting methods that engineers use, so I'm guessing that a clean 7 string emulation is not possible in a way that would fool you ears.
For single notes, power chords, and octaves, with careful pitch block level, low cut, and high cut settings, I can get the pitch block to sound astoundingly natural.
Years ago I sold my 5th generation Digitech Whammy because I was able to get great results with the Axe-FX III for the single note, power chord, octave use case, but I remember anything harmonically interesting had latency that bugged me on the Whammy with its polyphonic setting, so I just felt like it wasn't worth it.
If Serato Pitch 'N Time is the gold standard (and of course designed for entire mixes), and that cannot be run realtime, my assumption is for realtime applications the answer is just to avoid trying pitch shifting for anything more harmonically complex than a 5th or 4th. I have tuning machines, and I can just use them haha. But again, I may be missing some ingredient in how to get this to work well.
A good test is really to play something with a single dissonant note, like an add 9 minor chord, to ring out notes in an arpeggio, and see what glitches. Sorry if this sounds like I'm harping on this, so I'll leave it alone if there are no responses, but I feel like there's an ingredient in just missing!
