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Team,

I am interested in whether or not you can feed an arpanoid into an Eventide Pitchfactor, set to "diatonic" mode, then set the Pitchfactor to say F# Mixolydian, and have it "adjust" the arpeggios from the arpanoid to fit that scale.

Does anyone who has an Eventide Pitchfactor have a good feeling for whether or not its tracking is stellar enough to keep up with the mind rattling scales of the Arpanoid?

I've also heard that the Pitchfactor is mostly monophonic for that sort of task/tracking, but the arpanoid has no issues playing major and minor scales with an F#11 chord up and back again, so I'm wondering if the pitchfactor would get all grinded up when the arpanoid hit it with a polyphonic scale.

There's a ton of things I'd love to do with the Arpanoid if I could just lift some of the musical restrictions of it only doing the major and minor scales. I guess in some ways, there's a beautiful purity to the rigid geometric structure of the arpanoid, and the way your music has to conform to the crystalline bonds of the infinite patterns of stair-stepping, faceted, house of mirrors madness...but wouldn't it be nice to just have 4 presents in the eventide, and be able to just step the arpanoid through 4 different scale modes as you changed pitches.

Pitchfactor owners, if you could chime in on this before I drop some serious ducats in the direction of Eventide, I would be forever in your debt.

UPDATE: Studying the manual, it doesn't sound like it will do what I'm hoping...

My thought was to turn the input/dry all the way down, set the interval for the pitch shift to zero, and then play the Arpanoid into the Pitchfactor, playing an A major scale, and have the Pitchfactor adjust the notes to an A mixolydian.

What isn't clear is how the Pitchfactor deals with "accidentals" in this mode. Surely the Pitchfactor has to allow accidentals, and so when the Arpanoid plays its scale, I think the pitchfactor will just assume the notes outside the scale are supposed to be that way. Maybe if I set the Pitchfactor to play within that key/scale a 5th above the note being played, and then had the Arpanoid play a D Major scale it would output an A mixolydian? I dunno.

I guess here's what I need: If you own a pitchfactor...if you could kindly set it to diatonic mode, with pitch A at a major 5th, dry input off and pitch B off, and A mixolydian scale for the mode, and then manually play a D Major scale into it, I would love to know if an A Myxolydian comes out.

I don't have an arpanoid but I do use the arpeggios on my pitch factor and they track well with fast playing (not super fast) but you know, they also track well with lots of dirt and other jank so I think what you want might be possible, or at minimum sound bad in a good way,

do you have a demo of what you are playing now that you want the pitch factor to try to harmonize on?

No demo of it, as I'm sitting at work, just speculating on a hypothesis...but what would be coming out the output of the arpanoid is: D major scale, E major scale, G major scale (these three scales are in three different keys). What I want coming out of the Pitchfactor is: A mixolydian scale, B Aeolian scale, D Major (Ionian) scale (these three scales are a 5th above the input scales and are all in the same key).

I want the dry signal from the arpanoid turned completely down, so only the pitchfactor's scales are heard, but I want them to sound just like the arpanoid in tone and modulation, etc. The arpanoid will go stupidly fast...so I guess I'm ok with having to back off the throttle a little to let the pitchfactor keep up.

If the pitchfactor can do that, I'll go dig up the chest of coins in my back yard right now.

HighDeaf1080p wrote:No demo of it, as I'm sitting at work, just speculating on a hypothesis...but what would be coming out the output of the arpanoid is: D major scale, E major scale, G major scale (these three scales are in three different keys). What I want coming out of the Pitchfactor is: A mixolydian scale, B Aeolian scale, D Major (Ionian) scale (these three scales are a 5th above the input scales and are all in the same key).

I want the dry signal from the arpanoid turned completely down, so only the pitchfactor's scales are heard, but I want them to sound just like the arpanoid in tone and modulation, etc.

If the pitchfactor can do that, I'll go dig up the chest of coins in my back yard right now.

not sure about that (also at work btw)

you want to play those scales in sequence and then have the pitchfactor harmonize out the other scales right?
would I be able to replicate this by playing the major scales into the pitchfactor and see what comes out?

Yep, because that's exactly what the arpanoid does...when you play a D, it plays a D Major scale, when you play an E, it plays an E major scale...

So, you could just set the key for the pitchfactor to D major, set the interval to 5th, and then play those three major scales D, E, G. Then if you can tell whether the output scales stay in the key of D major (A Mixolydian, B Aeolian, D Ionian) I'll have my answer. My fear is that it will just ignore the fact that you set the key to D Major, and it will play A major, B major, and D major, when you play the D, E, and G major scales.

But if you have the dry signal turned all the way down to zero, you should be able to tell pretty easily if the scale its playing is standard ionian major, or one of the other modes. (I'm assuming it will let you turn your dry signal down, but I guess I don't know that for sure).

yeah you can dial out dry for sure

I can try it at some point this weekend

shouldn't be that hard to do

I may run the scales in my ditto and then I can play with settings a bit

I just did an experiment and I don't think you'd be able to pull this off the way you'd want.

You'd have to put the PF at 100% (no dry) and the note on the Diatonic mode can't be unison (or it will just copy what you are playing) So the base note would have to be a third or something and at that point the notes, while they are fighting to "correct" them, it just comes out as a slight gliss. The Harmony feature is neat, but when you remove the root note it doesn't sound too great and when you play wrong notes in the scale it will still harmonize them - so it's not like an Autotune where it will fix broken notes, it just harmonize them as close as it can. Hope this makes sense.

Yea, that makes total sense, and was exactly what I was afraid of. But it makes sense...that's they only way they could really allow for you to set a key, and scale, but still have you be able to play accidentals.

You nailed it...I was really trying to make it work like an auto tune for the arpanoid.

So, does anyone make an auto-tune pedal? Haha.

Well, actually, the more I think about it, maybe "as best it can" with a slight gliss is enough, given how fast the arpanoid is rolling up and down those scales. I'd be playing a note that's a 5th below the tonic of the scale I'm wanting, and if the pitch factor bends the two wrong notes in the arpanoids scale, it may be enough, given the arpanoid is just laying down a wall of sound or a synth pad to play over...I'll surely be adding delay, reverb, shimmer, and making it dreamy anyway. I guess my bigger concern in that scenario is whether the new scale the pitchfactor creates, has that awesome sci-fi metaphysical sound that the arpanoid creates, or if it mangles it and makes it sound "not that good" as you say. Defeats the purpose if it doesn't sound like the arpanoid acid trip, and instead sounds like a casio keyboard playing a scale, with some blurry gliss in there here and there.

I guess I wont rule out the pitchfactor just yet, but if there's a high quality autotune for guitar in a floor mounted stomp box or even a 1U rack mounted unit, that may be able to do exactly what I want with hard correction.