How do you drop your pitch a half or whole step?

javajunkie said:
Never again for me after owning the Dark Fire. It spent more time being repaired than being played and the tuner freaked out on me one time, the string breaking actually scratched by bottom eye lid. They wound up not have parts for the thing after sitting at Gibson for 3 months. The finally just gave me a new Standard Plus Top instead.
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Wow, sorry to hear about that. I've seen several accounts of folks having issues with them. It is a pretty complex system with a lot of moving parts. I didn't buy one until I found a close out at a VERY good price. I've been using it on and off for about 8 mos with no issues yet. Mine has always worked as advertised. So far... So good.
 
tonyi said:
OK, I'm inserting a pitch block on the grid, setting it to detune, detune down 2 and setting mix to 100%. I'm still in the same key. What am I leaving out?
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I found a factory preset in the XL i just purchased named "Down Full Step" that seemed to work well when I was messing with it on day-1. It's in Bank C, don't remember the preset number though. Give it a go and look under the hood to see what makes it tick. Let us know how you like it!
 
zenaxe said:
I know you were. I'm actually sort of weirdly impressed that you thought I was serious. See, it was a joke because the AxeFx is so flexible I was implying it could assign a CC# to the guitar's tuning keys. But, of course we ALL know that's physically impossible. It had nothing to do with the pitch shifter or key in the musical sense. Sigh... the trials and tribulations of having a dry sarcastic sense of humor on the internet.
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Maybe you're just not as funny as you think you are.... Now, that's dry and sarcastic :)
 
PRS513 said:
I found a factory preset in the XL i just purchased named "Down Full Step" that seemed to work well when I was messing with it on day-1. It's in Bank C, don't remember the preset number though. Give it a go and look under the hood to see what makes it tick. Let us know how you like it!
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I was just using this this morning. It's #280. I'm playing some Motley Crue songs, and Mick Mars tunes down a full step. I have several guitars, but none with a Floyd Rose that are setup 1 full step down. I didn't feel like messing with all that just to play some Crue, so I used the "Down Full Step Preset", and I swear it sounded pretty good to me. With some tweaking I think this preset would just about work for some "Shout At The Devil" album covers. I didn't notice any latency that would be any kind of a problem at all. YMMV. Might not be ideal for Djent stuff or dropping more than 1 step, but I don't do that stuff so I don't know.
 
I've never heard a standard shifter better than the Axe. For live performance, I use a Roland VG-99 with a hex pickup to change keys and get altered tunings. Latency is minimal, but it adds other types of artifacts due to the pickup modeling required.
 
steadystate said:
I've never heard a standard shifter better than the Axe.
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For some weird reason, the Ultra has a better latency than the Axe II when pitch shifting. At least that's what people are saying. I also remember seeing a comparison thread between the two units somewhere.
 
Hey

Would be nice to see that Ultra vs II pitch shifting video ,i was hear too that Ultra did have little bit better latency for pitch shiftings.

Zwiebelchen said:
For some weird reason, the Ultra has a better latency than the Axe II when pitch shifting. At least that's what people are saying. I also remember seeing a comparison thread between the two units somewhere.
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In early firmwares the pitch shifter in the Axe-FX II worked very well, but something was changed at some point. I think from fw 6 on dropping the pitch became pretty unusable for me because of the artifacts and the latency issues. It still works kinda ok if you just play some open chords, but when you play something faster it doesn't work for me anymore. Worst are leads, bends don't work at all.

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The changes in 12.03 improved pitch functionality (Whammy).
Works great, except for simulated dropped tuning.
That used to work better in the past.
I had a great sounding simulated bass preset once on the Ultra.
For some reason I haven't been able to retain that in current firmware.
 
Dr Buds said:
I think I might have to settle for this myself. I've tried using the pitch block with the above method but it just isn't natural enough. The latency kills it. I know Simeon has come up with a way to mask this somewhat, but it's still not usable for normal everyday playing (for me anyway). Hopefully this can be improved eventually.
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Yes the latency is always going to be a problem. If you use it for one song and don't play too fast it is ok, but not if you play many songs in down or up tuning. Same goes for bass simulation patches. Taking along another guitar is the only natural and good sounding way when you are really serious on down tuning.
 
CraigJohnsJr said:
I'm interested in an answer outside of switching guitars. While it'd be nice to have a guitar for every tuning, gear adds up fairly quickly when you're traveling, so IMO, the less the better! My XL is coming in today, so I'm sure I'll find my own answer relatively soon, but do you all think the latency from pitch shifting is that bad? Like, unusable? It seems odd that the AXE can recreate amps and effects to the tee, but can't pitch shift. Hm..
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Electro-Harmonix's pedals that simulate strings and organ sounds, also can transpose in a VERY believable way. And since they are analog, there is no latency.
 
CraigJohnsJr said:
I wonder what the latency is like. It has always been a problem with the Digitech Whammy pedals, but I'd imagine that eliminating delay would be a focal point in creating this pedal... If anyone's tried it, speak up!
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I guess it will work as well as the Whammy DT... fully usable in live situations, and best pich shifter I ever used by far.
Moreover, the "Momentary" mode is great in order to avoid artifacts...

This is a pretty fast test using the "momentary" switch. I used a 6 strings guitar to emulate a 7 strings, so -5 semitones...
Using the momentary switch, the pitch shift is only aplied when playing regular notes and it's not working when playing harmonics or pick scraping.

 
Drop tune is a great tool if it works. I have used it in the past with the pitch shifter but sometimes with a firmware update like FW 15 latency increases in my preset and sound is not usable anymore.
I have mentioned it before, would be great if Cliff and co could create a specific droptune block as It would distinguish the AXE II even more from the "few" competing products that exist.

let's hope one day we will get it (if possible to program) as very useful for both rehearsals and live gigs.
 
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