We need a better transposer please. The current one has tons of digital artifacts, even when transposing only a half step.
Transposing up is even worse. It’s unusable for anything clean. Please give us a better transposer.
This request is recent (August 2025), check here:
1 Like
It is, and thank you for pointing it out. I already gave my vote to it.
However, is that post clear enough as a request, in order to be considered? Its main concern seems to be more about additional modes for the pitch shifters, rather than an improvement on the existing algorithm.
I’m not sure if the request is clear enough for other users to express their interest.
1 Like
I agree that the original post is not clear enough but, transpose appears to have the most discussion (arguments) out of the three effects mentioned in that thread.
1 Like
There is no perfect transpose effect. It is very processor intensive to pitch in real time and there are trade-offs.The reality is that artefacts are a lot more noticeable on clean sounds and complex chords display all the faults. Used for distorted parts in the right way and nobody will notice live.
I’ve had Kemper, Helix and QC. For me the Kemper was probably the cleanest with “smooth chords”, but the latency is increased for this and it is harder to play. Listening to my friends FM3, the transpose effect is not so great, but I think larger devices have a better algorithm? QC is easily the best transpose I’ve tried for the way I play live and is considerably lower latency than the others.
If they release a polyphonic transpose effect, don’t be surprised if it isn’t what you want.
3 Likes
Well that’s what these forums are for, aren’t they? To request new features?
As a QC user, I’m in need of a better transposer. I don’t do metal, my transposing needs are for clean and currently the QC’s doesn’t cut it. I’m glad it works for you with distortion, I’m well aware that it does, but we all come from different backgrounds here.
I also owned a Helix and remember that Line 6 came out with a bad transposer too. People complained and thus they improved the algorithm, a couple of firmware versions later and voila, we had a better transposer. You could load less effects on that path, but users understood that was the price.
Yes, transposing is DSP intensive, but the QC also has 4 cores, so the DSP is there. I personally wouldn’t mind disabling one of the paths (cores) in order to hog the DSP necessary for a better transposer (if that’s how it would work at all, I’m no engineer, just saying I understand there are trade-offs).
5 Likes
Poly Capo is easily the best polyphonic pitch shifter. Wish Neural would actually make a Transpose that works. Anyone who says there aren’t weird glitch/artifacts with Transpose just doesn’t know what to listen for.
3 Likes
Poly Capo has less artifacts, that’s true. But it glitches more in my experience. And also feels and sounds worse.
Hypertune (plugin by Polychrome DSP) is the only pitch shifter / transposer I am aware of that really improves on the QC.
Every other pitch effect always has “side effects”. Fractal is way worse cutting of frequencies as well. Helix I don’t like that much as it sounds digital. Drop is pretty good, but not better. And then there are those like Eventide, which are insanely great pitch shifting effects, but not really “natural” sounding and rather to be used to affect your tone as well.
Side note: I never understood, why NDSP calls it “monophonic”. Because it clearly is polyphonic. Otherwise it wouldn’t pitch multiple notes at once (regardless of the quality).
4 Likes
It would be wrong of me to assume that QC transpose suits everyone and I’m not saying no to development. If they could come up with something like the Kemper polyphonic transpose, I’m sure that would work for Vocalead’s type of use. It is just that it would inevitably introduce more latency, so let’s keep what we have too!
Line 6 hired the Digitech team to develop their Poly Capo and it is almost as good a the Kemper. They do have a sliding scale to balance latency against quality, but I never found a happy medium. Again, it completely depends on your type of usage.
1 Like
Absolutely. If this is in response to my comment, I’d just like to clarify that I am not against this feature request. I just find it weird to read comments about literally every pitch shifter saying how bad they sound. Eventide, Helix, Fractal, NDSP… you always find a lot of people complaining. Which just shows how hard it must be to make a good one. And I would argue that it is impossible as of now to make a perfect one.
So my comment was simply to offer some perspective.
1 Like
Same thoughts here. Even the non-realtime pitch-shifting in DAWs or other apps has lots of artifacts sometimes, so I always wonder if there is a perfect realtime solution. It seems the opinions vary a lot on this topic.
3 Likes
Sorry, this wasn’t direct response to you and I’ve edited things to make it clear.
I created a topic not only about the transposer, but about the pitch shifter in general. Before QC, I had FM9, where the virtual capo worked with artifacts, but there are as many as 4 channels of a polyphonic pitch shifter, there are natural major and minor, harmonic major and minor, melodic major and minor, chromatic pitch shifter, user modes. That’s what I would like QC to have, and of course a polyphonic transposer of perfect quality without artifacts, because QC’s power is the highest among processors.
1 Like
I think the Cortex transposer is as good as the best dedicated pedals on the market. I own a digitech Drop and and Morpheus Drop, and the Cortex is as good as those.
Mathematically, it’s impossible to produce perfect transpose of highly complex and non periodic wav files with only milliseconds latency (acceptable computation time). A single clean guitar note produces harmonics. Then adding multiple strings adds to this complexity. And the faster you change notes and chords, the harder it is to compute the changes to other pitches.
My advice is A) put the transposer first in your chain, B) ensure your guitar intonation is perfect and C) make sure your guitar is tuned perfectly. I find slightly out of tune strings causes most of the audible glitches.
2 Likes
I asked them once (when huge arguments over whether it really was or not were popular) and they said that the results are polyphonic, obviously, but that the processing is not done on a polyphonic basis. They didn’t choose to explain on what basis it was done but apparently it’s something different.
1 Like
I agree with this. Polytune by Polychrome DSP is nearly flawless, it’s also pretty transparent when it comes to transposing up, that’s why my other petition from Neural DSP is to add USB send/return 
.
The Digitech Drop is also pretty awesome, but it only goes down. Yeah, one could use a capo, but I have around 200 presets in my live band setup, and we’re all hooked up to MIDI, so it’s much more comfortable to just have transposition saved into the preset, than to have to fetch a capo.
1 Like
You might have struck on why the QC Transpose works so well for me. What you say about tuning is so true. The Transpose effect is first in the chain, but more importantly I have an Evertune bridge.
1 Like
Unfortunately Transpose is just a glitchy pitch shifter, regardless of tuning. Yes, I’ve tried it with an Evertune
1 Like
Would be nice to have a comparison of „best in class“ transposers vs QC to understand why the opinions differ that much.
Recent is a concept in Neural’s world that really means months or even years. For anybody that wants improvements, don’t hold your breath but be patient and enjoy your QC in the meantime.