I hate to say you’re incorrect, but transpose is very glitchy. There are many videos showing it. Just try playing a chord into it. You won’t get the same glitching with Poly Capo from Line 6. I’ve tested these and a bunch of other pitch shifters so many times.
Try a chord with transpose on a clean amp setting. It will sound like there’s a tremolo on because the pitch shifter is glitching so much.
As much as I would love to say Neural’s Transpose is better….it isn’t. Hopefully they can improve the algorithm. If you like Neural’s other pitch shifters that’s totally fair to your preferences. They are very useful.
I agree, the competing modellers don’t really offer better pitch shifting right now. But some plugins do, for example HyperTune by PolyChrome DSP.
And because NDSP themselves advertised a polyphonic pitch shifter long ago, this is a reasonable feature request.
They did have stuff listed in the device list on their website for a few years that included proposed effects (but were not on the device yet). Which was very confusing when I first purchased it tbh. I think they proposed transpose, but never clarified if it would be polyphonic. I could be wrong, but don’t think they specified whether it would be.
They have since deleted that part of their website I think, or at least updated it to take off the proposed amps and effects they changed their mind on adding
Yeah. They keep deleting stuff from their website. Like the synth block which was said to come soon. And I also remember a sentence along the lines of „very aggressive update plans and features“.
I didn’t know the synth was announced with “soon” more than just showing it in the QC NDSP page (wich is still here) A bit concerning that they delete things with at the same time updates that came slowly…
A good polyphonic pitch shifting would be apprecciated ! voted for.
I just got my Quad Cortex a couple of days ago, and I’m bummed it doesn’t have a polyphonic pitch shifter for downtuning. My old Helix Floor (the original one) has it, so I’m really hoping Neural DSP adds this feature soon. I already voted!
Yeah, I know. I tried them, but they’re not as good as the Line 6 Poly Capo and nowhere near my DigiTech Whammy DT, which is a bummer for something that costs $2500 CDN. I really hope they update it. Line 6 didn’t have polyphonic pitch at first, but they added it. I eventually want to get rid of my Whammy DT to save space on my board, but yeah, for practice, the Transpose effect works, but I wouldn’t use it live or for recording.
Honestly my biggest gripe with the QC aside from the limited midi functionality. There has even been a person who uploaded clips on this forum claiming Transpose sounded better than other polyphonic pitch shifters…..but Transpose had way more artifacts. It’s fair to assume anyone who claims Transpose sounds great just doesn’t know what to listen for. It’s truly the only effect that keeps me unsure about the QC compared to Helix Stadium
Having just bought a QC, I already own Kemper and Helix. They both have polyphonic pitch transpose, but usability is way behind the QC. It’s one of the things I’m most impressed with since moving over.
Latency is everything for playability. Of course, complex minor, or extended chords will bring you artefacts, but there is always a trade off with such a processor intensive effect. The Kemper deals with clean sounds and elaborate chords with the “smooth chords” function. It is very effective, but costs you even more latency.
You’ll only be using a transpose effect for live and rehearsal. Anything else and you can use another guitar, or retune. In short, the QC gets me where I want to go and improves my playing when transpose is active.
You can also do versions that are less effective like Transpose on at least Helix. You just like the lower latency it seems. Honestly I would rather have slightly more latency rather than hear out of tune chords. The monophonic nature of transpose really messes me up live because it makes everything warble weird (even with distortion) and it all sounds out of tune when it isn’t a single note or octave. Different preferences for sure, but Neural did promise a polyphonic pitch shifter when the QC was released
True that you can vary the latency on Helix and trade off against pitch quality. The problem is that, use more than one setting live and you playing goes all over the place as you try and adjust to a different delay in the signal.
But you don’t have to switch to different settings live haha. Just find one that works and keep it set there. The amount of latency some of the Helix pitch shifting causes is less than some boss digital pedals add
Coming back to this thread, in case this is useful to somebody: my original assumption was that pitch shifters would just apply a simple global transposition to the audio, like changing playback speed, and that “polyphonic” was mainly relevant to harmonizers, where different notes might need to be tracked separately.
That turned out to be only partly true. A simple resampling operation does transpose everything equally, but it also changes the duration. Pitch shifters that keep the same timing while changing pitch have to do more sophisticated processing. In practice, the ones perceived as sounding better usually handle things like overlapping notes, harmonics, attack transients, decay, and distortion more gracefully.
So even when the goal is just transposition by the same interval across the whole signal, “polyphonic” still matters: it generally means the algorithm can deal better with chords and note overlap, not just single-note lines. That is not the same thing as a harmonizer, but it is more complex than simple playback-speed change.
