The problem with every other shifter
One algorithm is never enough
Phase vocoders destroy transients on percussive material — same kick,
different random output every trigger. Granular engines can’t go full
robotic. Bin-remappers click when you ask them to be musical.
None of them let you be both at once.
Cyborg Pitch runs two completely separate engines in parallel and crossfades
between them continuously. The CHARACTER knob is the whole instrument.
Architecture
Two engines, always running
Clean path
GranularShifter
Fixed trigger clock, Hann-windowed grains, 4× overlap-add.
Deterministic — identical input + knob = identical output, every time.
No phase state, no artefacts. Your kicks stay kicks.
Alien path
SpectralRemap
FFT bin-remapper. No grains, no window beating. Structurally cannot click.
Robotic, metallic, Dalek — frequency-warped into whatever register
you point it at.
The central control
Character
Equal-power crossfade between both engines. Everything between is uncharted.
◀ granular · musical · percussive
spectral · robotic · alien ▶
Controls — exactly as seen in the UI
Every knob, explained
PITCH
±24 semitones. Both engines track it simultaneously, click-free.
FREQ
Inharmonic Hz offset on the alien path — ±12 maps to ±600 Hz. The Dalek register.
FFT
Window size 128–16384. Small = grainy/robotic, large = smooth. Crossfades internally, no dropout.
METAL
Spectral scatter / metallic comb on the alien engine.
SMEAR
Warp + scatter intensity. Stacks with Metal. The inhuman wash.
DECAY
Grain length. Controls texture density on both engines.
FEEDBACK
Grain re-injection. High values build dense spectral halos.
DRIVE
Asymmetric triode waveshaper post-blend. Up to ×18 gain into tanh saturation.
TUBE
HF tilt on the drive stage. Left = warm body, right = attack bite.
MIX
Latency-matched dry/wet — no comb filtering at any mix level.
OUTPUT
Final trim. PDC fully reported to host.
CHARACTER
The main event. Equal-power crossfade, clean to alien.
Engineering
Details that actually matter
Transient recovery. Granular and spectral shifting smear attack
transients by design. A post-blend TransientPunch stage re-sharpens every onset
with a dual-speed envelope follower and HF soft-clip stabiliser — always on,
at a fixed musical level. Kicks and snares still hit.
Latency alignment. The dry path tracks the active engine’s
latency every block. At any FFT size the blend is phase-coherent and the host’s
PDC compensation is exact. No ghost delays, no wet-dry slap.
Click-free bypass. Bypass crossfades over ~30 ms through the
same processing path. No sample-jump, no click, no PDC discontinuity.
VST3 · Windows · 64-bit
Stereo in/out
Full PDC reporting
Sample-accurate smoothing
Click-free bypass
No iLok · No dongle
JUCE 8