Pitch Shifting.

[xalama qo]

Ha, yup, good luck with that! I'm looking forward to seeing what others come up with because vst land has always seemed very sparse when it comes to great pitch shifting.
Kuassa is hitting a home run with their latest offering imo. Very very nice indeed

[Uncle E]

Is Kuassa Harmonitron not sufficient? If you’re going to get the other two, may as well get the entire Pitch Bundle since the price is almost the same.

[CrystalWizard]

Still not the same calibre as Helix but it's by far the closest I've seen.

Give it a try with it before your amp plugin. This might give you results more similar to what you got with Helix. Kuassa made the demo video the Tom Morello way, with amp before the pitch shifting, and I believe Helix has pitch shifting before the amp (or at least before the cabinet simulation).

This is very important. Shift the guitar signal before the amp model for cleaner results.

[someone89a]

Okay so checking out more of the Kuassa stuff - I'm very impressed. Fuzzes and amps sound top notch too...

[nix808]

only if ur shifting for key should the shifter be first,
otherwise build any chain in any order, if being creative/experimental

I am Phonics who released the one Enroe mentioned
-I've been trying other things too

..but I'm not that motivated, I play MIDI guitar, where pitch shifting is trivial

[Uncle E]

only if ur shifting for key should the shifter be first

Why?

[nix808]

if u shift the signal first,
the shifting artifacts are denuded post(by the other fx in the chain),
and it's artifacts can become almost nothing, which is typically a degree of granularization
(edit:- vibrato is another thing that happens)
In my experience, if u run the shifter later, it's imperfections are more audible

...like for example if u pitch shift before a phaser say, u couldn't tell u used my somewhat crude shifters (hopefully),
whereas if u shift after a phaser, it creates a noticeable grain sound, or at least a change in the sound which would usually be undesirable
-it's cleaner if u shift first, the shifter can become imperceptible

The goal with these things is to have no artifact, a purity of guitar stream.

If you want to get whatever sound in sound design play, use whatever chain for fun imo

I am interested in how to do this, should I up the current 4 models here?
-I think the one Enroe likes is better now too

[Uncle E]

Sure. That's why Tom Morello put it in his effects loop instead of in front of his amp, he was trying to make the guitar sound more synthetic and less like a guitar. For the purposes of replacing the Helix pitch shifter, though, it should be used before the amp model and I would even recommend using it before any distortion or fuzz.

[xalama qo]

My reservation with using it before distortion is that you're then in effect distorting a chord or triad, which is actually fine on guitar, but it can sound a bit terrible if the harmonies used are somewhat exotic. That's why I suggested getting your overdrive tone first, and then harmonize that. The PS pedal duplicates the distorted tone, instead of the distortion pedal distorting a potentially harmonically complex triad and sounding like mush in the process.

[NAD]

For best results I'd recommend sending each voice to a separate track and then applying distortion individually on each track. That way you avoid intermodulation distortion which can sound pretty nasty on any interval other than octaves and fifths. Probably not possible in the case of polyphonic pitch shifting.

[Uncle E]

Yes, these are great points. Kuassa’s Amplifikation 360 allows you to run effects in parallel, so each pitch could be sent to its own distortion. That way you can avoid the intermodulation distortion while still getting the smoothing benefits of running the pitch shifter before the distortion (if that’s what you’re after).

[zerocrossing]

Yes, these are great points. Kuassa’s Amplifikation 360 allows you to run effects in parallel, so each pitch could be sent to its own distortion. That way you can avoid the intermodulation distortion while still getting the smoothing benefits of running the pitch shifter before the distortion (if that’s what you’re after).

I need to dig into Kuassa more. I was very impressed with their new pitch shifters.

[xalama qo]

The OP's other question was about guitar synths, and I vaguely remember a video of a guy demoing a realtime audio to midi convertor vst using a guitar as his input signal. It was extremely tight and accurate. I just can't remember the name for the life of me, but my jaw was on the floor. So these kinds of audio to midi plugins do exist in extremely high quality without needing any proprietary hex-pickup or whatever from Roland. With something like that any vst or hardware synth can be used as your sound generator.
If you don't necessarily want to make your guitar sound like a Moog bass, but just want to run it thru some weird synthy modules like FM or ring modulation I'd give KarmaFX Modular 2 a good look as it's easy to use, comes in an instrument version and an audio fx version, has a ton of built in effects (including a pitch shifter), and is fully modular, so your only limit is your imagination. I'm not aware of any pitch tracking modules that you could then use to drive a synth oscillator, but the dev is very approachable and I'm sure he has the chops to code that with minimal effort. Like taking the pitch tracking from the pitch shifter and converting that to control voltage for the synth oscillator. I'm no DSP guy, but I'm sure he's got the building blocks ready for assembly already.
But as far as any single vst that will accept a guitar input and turn it into a synth sound, I know of none, except Line6. Unless you abuse ones intended for vocals, like iZotope Vocal Synth, or NI The Mouth. Actually, Reaktor might have some guitar to synth stuff in the user library. That should be everyone's first port of call for exotic needs. The gift that keeps on giving Go check it out.