Devious Machines Pitch Monster – Review

Pitch Monster by Devious Machines is a new formant- and pitch-shifting multi effect, available as VST 2, VST 3, AudioUnit and Protools 64-bit AAX plug-in. It's core contains three different algorithms - a granular engine, a formant-shifter and a vocoder with up to 64 voices, a harmonizer, midi capabilities and much more.

The installation of Pitch Monster is super simple. Once the plug-in is installed via a standard installer it has to be authorized from the menu via the gear icon within the plug-in editor.

The first algorithm or engine is a granulizer which sounds very smooth and clean, depending on the grain rate knob. The formant engine allows to set the formants independent to the pitch, which enables fixed formants on vocals for example. Twisting the formant shift knob can also lead to interesting alien, monster or mickey mouse effects. Last but not least the vocoder engine simulates the typical robotic vocoder sound and allows multiple voices (max. 8-voice polyphony / 64 voices in total)that even can be played via MIDI.

Both, pitch and time (the amount of delay between the the individual voices) can be spread and randomized (jitter) to create wide, chorus like textures and lush futuristic sounding results.

Also very useful, you can open Voltage Modular in any DAW as a VST plug-in and play the patches via Cubase, Ableton Live, Logic, FL Studio or any other VST compatible DAW.

Pitch Monster allows the user to select between Chord Mode and Midi Mode, which both allow to playback more then one note. In Chord Mode you can activate notes on the on-screen keyboard to create chords with up to eight notes. There are 8 chord slots to store different chords, enabling to switch chords in real time. In Midi Mode it is possible to play Pitch Monster like a synthesizer.

• Harmonise with up to 8 voices of polyphony
• Huge 6-octave range
• Dial in 8 voices of unison for a 64 voice stack
• Granular, formant-shifting and vocoder engines
• Realtime MIDI control
• Programmable chord memories, with hundreds of presets
• Dual high + low pass filters for fine tonal control
• Wide mode for BIG stereo effects
• Responsive, low-latency DSP engine

The most important question would be how does Pitch Monster sound? This question can be quickly answered - Pitch Monster sounds really good without any annoying artefact's or tuning issues. The granular mode sounds very smooth and silky and gives the sound an expensive touch. But also the typical rough, edgy and metallic granular sound can be achieved with the use of the Grain Rate knob. With the formant mode it's very easy to transform vocals and voices and with the addition of pitch and time spread, jitter and unison features, Pitch Monster is very versatile and can change the output from subtile to brutal. The possibility to change notes via MIDI and even play Pitch Monster like an instrument in the vocoder mode enables even more variety. The user interface is very clean, clear and not confusing at all. All relevant functions do have its own knob or button and during the test there was no crash or other issue. Well done Devious Machines!

Pitch Monster is directly available for:
GBP 79.99£
at the Devious Machines website here: Devious Machines | Pitch Monster