User Guide / Owners Manual

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THE BASICS - ABOUT MICROSHIFT

MicroShift — Version 5

Microshift brings us back to the early days of pitch-shifting, and in

fact our very own early days working at Eventide.* In those days, we

(Ken and Bob) were asked to create a stereo harmonizer, what would

eventually become the H3000 Multi-Effects Processor. The H3000

became an absolute effects monster, with dozens of effects algorithms

and hundreds of presets. The hard work paid off, and today you’ll be

hard pressed to ﬁnd a studio or venue that doesn’t include a H3000 (or

later variant) in the rack.

As cool as all that was, the thing is, when we would walk up to a rack

with an H3000 in it, it was almost always set up for only small pitch

shifts to thicken and widen background vocals or instrumentation. The

idea behind this trick is fairly simple; dial in a few cents up on the left,

and a few down on the right, add a dash of delay, and voila - instant fat

stereo sound! Of course, it’s been used on lots of other things but that’s

really where the whole thing got started. Micro pitch-shifting is still a

vital part of most mix engineers “bag of tricks” a couple of decades or

so later, especially on guitars get crazy wide walls of sound. For this

reason, vintage pitch-shifters like the H3000 as well as the Eventide

H910(x2), and AMS DMX 15-80 are still in demand. In fact, some of the

earliest plug-ins we developed, SoundBlender and PurePitch, were

designed to bring this trick into the burgeoning digital domain.

Simply put, MicroShift makes it W I D E . Be it vocals, synths, guitars,

backing vocals or whatever you choose to run through it, MicroShift

uses this classic studio trick to spread out, thicken up, or give a new

space to any track you hit with it. MicroShift takes the idea of making

“wider” even further than the original hardware could with the new

FOCUS knob, letting you push and widen speciﬁc ranges without

affecting the rest of the track. It’s amazing for adding “shimmer” to a

vocal, or “air” to a guitar. You can control the amount of detune and/

or delay, and there’s even a mix knob let you tweak the effect to ﬁt just

right in the mix.

With three pitch-shift modes, MicroShift combines the classic sound of

hardware coupled with advanced new features, all in a very intuitive and

easy to use plug-in. MicroShift is the go-to tool for making things wider

and bigger in your own virtual effects rack.

**Note: Eventide, Harmonizer, and H3000 are all trademarks of

Eventide Inc. AMS is a trademark of AMS Neve Ltd. These are mentioned

for historical purposes only. AMS and Eventide in no way endorse this

product, and are not associated or afﬁliated with Soundtoys.