I sing in an all female a cappella group with six singer and we're thinking about trying to use pitch shifter pedals when singing some of our arrangements.

I believe that some songs will sound more interesting when adding the lower octave to the 3. alto part like I understand that we can achieve with pitch shifter pedals. This is especially interesting for us since we are all female so our group does not have the same wide total register that a mixed group normally have

So I'm looking for an advise on what kind to get - some are really simple and only does pitch shifting, and others are full effect machines with a lot of different available effects.

And I also wonder if it will work the way I think it will Has anyone else here had experience with using pitch shifter pedals?

hi Ragna,

Bass guitar pedals trigger fast. We just bought one, I 'll check out the name. Think it was sold at 1500 SEK.

Junko Kamei is a member of japanese female group Takarabune. Anders Jalkéus says their performance is very good, he saw them in Graz this summer. I don't know if they use an octave device, but maybe it is interesting for you to discuss with them anyway.

Transister Radio Girls from Copenhagen is a very talented group of singers who use an octave device on some songs. Here is the web site of their leader Bonnie Denise Christiansen.

This is the pedal we just bought.

Thanks a lot for a very concrete suggestion! This pedal seems to be a nice little thing, and it has got good reviews as well. If I have understood how to use it, I just put it between the microphone and the mixer  And it seems to need its own power supply as well....

I'll check in with Junko and Bonnie to hear about their experiences and thoughts about the subjct as well, thanks a lot for the contact links!

That's a great pedal - we've been using it for some years and it has worked great and sounded just like it is supposed to. Some digital octavizer sounds much stranger.

It can be used with batteries if you want to, and we use it rom aux out on one channel and aux in on another so we can adjust the level and EQ in a nice and easy way.

Thank you for the answer :-) I am a gadget freak and I suspect that I'll buy this thing just for the fun of it as well...

What songs will you typically use it for, any published songs that I can listen to samples of somewhere?

To my knowledge - TRG hasn't used this kind of effect live before. When doing stuff like Thingamabobb they have digital effects, but it's going to be interesting to see what they'll use the octavizer for!

It's a Swedish made foot pedal from EBS. But you can find other brands just as good. But be sure it is really fast.

Our group has been experimenting with the EBS-pedal and we find it very useful. For us, the best way to put it in the mix is to connect it as a send effect and send the signal of the bass-singer pre-fader and take it back on a separate mono channel. The returning signal we then attenuate quite much in the high frequency range and compress quite hard as well.