Guitar Noize - guitar news, crazy guitar designs and cool guitar videos

When I hear the name Eventide I immediately think of expensive pro rack effect units such as the H3000 made famous by players such as Steve Vai in the late 80’s which has now been replaced by the H8000FW. Anyway Eventide concentrated on their rack effects units for many years until recently unleashing a trio of stomp boxes, the TimeFactor (Delay effects), the ModFactor (Modulation effects such as chorus, flanger, phaser) and the newest addition the PitchFactor.

When I received the PitchFactor from Eventide I was very excited, I had never used an Eventide product before but had heard their effects on so many records. This pedal is what most people would have expected Eventide to release as their first stomp box as this is their Harmonizer in a pedal and it is very hard to categorize as you will see in my video demo. I have left out the most obvious effect which is the actual diatonic harmonizer effect which harmonizes your signal in whatever key you like, and is very easy to set by holding a button and strumming a chord the Eventide analyses and sets the key to harmonize to. There are a few good video demos on YouTube which show these features, I chose not to focus on this because I wanted to point out how many things this pedal actual does apart from this effect! incidentally they have also utilised this advanced pitch analysis to include a very accurate chromatic tuner which is a nice addition.

I also want to point out that I don’t own an expression pedal but if you do this expands the possibilities of the PitchFactor immensely as it can control the wet/dry mix of an effect or any combination of parameters, for example you can use it to create whammy pedal effects or change the attack of the HarPeggiator™ which as you will see has some crazy sounds. You can also control program changes and vary parameters continuously via MIDI which is beyond my comprehension but I’m sure some of the more technical guitarists out there will appreciate this feature. Another nice feature is that the PitchFactor supports instrument or line level inputs and outputs so you can use it in front of the amp or in an amp effects loop which to me is very important.

The PitchFactor is quite a large stomp box (4.8” (H) x 7.5” (W) x 2.12” (D)) due to all these extra features that is probably the width of 3 Boss pedals but if you were to put all 3 Eventide pedals on a board you probably have every effect you are ever going to use covered. It is also built to last with rugged cast metal construction, the second you pick it up you know this pedal is going to withstand a lifetime of gigs.

The PitchFactor has Tap tempo and MIDI clock sync and 100 factory presets which are unlimited through MIDI. The presets are easy to flick through and you can set up a range of presets to work with so that you don’t have to cycle through all 50 banks. Each bank has 2 presets which you can flick between at the press of a footswitch so if you wanted 10 presets for a gig you could say set Bank 45 - 50 each with your 2 presets which can contain any mixture of effect and then contain the banks to this 5 (very simple to do) so you only ever see these and can’t accidently go to Bank 10 for instance.

The effects are amazing and can be quite trance-inducing especially the HarPeggiator™ and Crystal™ but what surprised me the most was that I could also get a very nice Chorus effect and some great Delays (up to 1.5 seconds of stereo delay) which you can add modulation to in order to get a analog style tape echo, but you can also take it further by changing the pitch of the 2 delays in order to create interesting harmonized effects. The Octaver™ is also a lot of fun and you can add fuzz as one of the paramters for that Hendrix vibe. If you want to create your own presets it is very easy to dial in different sounds using the array of parameter knobs and don’t let the number of knobs scare you, it doesn’t take very long to familiarize yourself with the controls and if you get stuck the manual has plenty of information on how to get the best out of each effect as well as a quickstart guide.

But the best way to get an idea of what this pedal is capable of is to watch my YouTube demo, then check out the Tone Factor video demos too.

For more information on Eventide products check out www.eventide.com

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