Sync Pitch Shift

A clock-synced granular pitch shifter built for rhythmic material. It transposes audio up or down two octaves while staying locked to your tempo, so breaks, drums, and loops keep their groove instead of smearing into mush. Stereo in, stereo out, with left and right processed independently.

How it works

Pitch shifters chop incoming audio into tiny grains, retune them, and stitch them back together — but free-running grains blur transients. Sync Pitch Shift solves this by tying each grain to the clock: one grain covers exactly one tempo sub-beat of source audio, grains fire back-to-back with no overlap, and a near-rectangular window keeps their edges crisp. The result is a transposition that holds onto every kick and snare hit — and when you want to use it on tonal material instead, the Window control softens those grain edges to trade that sharpness for a smoother, click-free blend. Div sets how finely the grain grid is sliced, from 1/32 up to a dotted whole note — shorter divisions track fast material tightly, longer ones lend a smoother, more washed character.

Controls

  • Pitch — transposition from -24 st (two octaves down) through unity at centre to +24 st (two octaves up).
  • Div — the grain size as a note value, stepped through twelve divisions from 1/32 to a dotted whole note (1/1.), each straight value paired with its dotted form. This is the rhythmic grid the engine resamples against.
  • Mix — dry/wet blend; fully wet at 100%, back it off to fold the original signal in underneath.
  • Window — the grain-edge crossfade, from a hard rectangle at 0 (the sharpest, clickiest edges) up to a full triangle at 0.5 (the smoothest). Low settings keep transients knife-edge crisp for drums and breaks; open it up to crossfade the seams between grains and tame the buzz, broadening the effect onto pads, vocals, and other sustained, tonal material at the cost of a little transient bite.
  • Clock — where the tempo comes from. Ext measures the pulses arriving at the clock input, which is how this module has always worked. Song follows the timeline's tempo directly, with no cable at all. Int runs at its own speed, set by the BPM field beside it. One thing worth knowing: in Ext the divisions are relative to whatever you clock it with, so feeding it sixteenths makes every label four times faster than it reads. In Int and Song the module knows what a quarter note is, so the labels mean exactly what they say.
  • BPM — the tempo for Int. In Song it greys out and shows you the timeline's tempo instead; in Ext it greys out too, because the cable is in charge.

Inputs & outputs

  • In L / In R — stereo audio to be shifted; the two channels run through their own histories with no cross-feed.
  • Pitch / Div / Mix / Window CV — voltage control over each knob; patch an LFO or envelope to sweep Pitch for pitch-bend dives, step Div to flip rhythmic feel on the fly, fade Mix for swells, or modulate Window to open and close the grain edges in motion.
  • Clock — patch a quarter-note clock here; while the Clock control is set to Ext, tempo is read from the time between pulses. Left unpatched it sits at 120 BPM.
  • Reset — a trigger re-aligns the grain grid to your upstream beat, useful when the clock drifts out of phase.
  • Out L / Out R — the shifted stereo result.

Tips

  • Always feed it the same clock that drives your sequencer — the transient-preserving trick only works when the grain grid matches the music.
  • Pitch a breakbeat down an octave at a coarse Div for instant chopped-and-screwed weight; go up an octave on a short division for chiptune-style leads that stay rhythmically tight.