Pitch Glide Example

Some people have been a little confused as to how to use the Pitch Glide. Here is a brief explanation of how to set it up.

The Pitch parameter refers to half steps. -24 is 2 octaves downward, -12 is one octave downward, -7 is a perfect fifth downward, -5 is a perfect fourth downward, etc.

I commonly use it one of two ways. The first is a simple static shift, where I use it for an octave or perfect fifth harmony. Then I set the pitch where I want it and set Mix to around 40-50%. This lets both my original note and the shifted note through at around equal volume.

The other way is to assign an EXP pedal to its Pitch parameter to use it like a traditional whammy pedal. For this, I like Mix at 100% and to place the pedal before my amp/distortion. This makes it sound like I'm actually using a whammy bar - all the pitch shifting is before the amp and there are no harmony notes. Here is an example of how to set it up:


Patch

Notice two things: first I assign the pedal itself to FS8. I don't like using the EXP toe switch to turn anything on and off, because it can be a bit stiff and less reliable than a traditional foot switch. So FS8 is what I use to toggle it on/off. I like to use either FS4 or FS8 since they are closest to the Exp pedal.

The pitch parameter is assigned to EXP-1. This is the mode I have the EXP pedal in when I save the patch. So I never have to use the exp pedal's toe switch to switch to EXP-1 - I start there by default when I load the patch.

I set the min value to 50%. This means when the pedal is in the heel position, I get no pitch shift. The max value is 75%. This means when the pedal is in toe position, I will get a +1 octave shift.

Alternatively, I can set min and max to go in reverse order. For instance, I can set min to 50% and max to 25%. My heel position is still set to get no pitch shift, but as I move towards the toe position, now the pitch is shifted downwards 1 octave.

Unfortunately, octaves appear to be the only pitch shift that matches up to the half steps used in the Pitch Glide. For instance, to get a perfect fifth, you'd have to set the min or max to 64.5833333, which is not available. All the intervals other than perfect octaves fall in between the available percentages.