Harmonizer pedals
Harmonizer pedals will intelligently stack intervals onto your melody strictly in your key, transforming your single-player sound into a beautiful harmony of two guitarists playing in perfect unison. Thicken your tone and become a one-man ensemble with this must-have effect
What is the Harmonizer Effect?
Alot of us can remember a time where if we wanted to harmonize guitar leads, we’d need two guitarists playing at the same time and hope to the high heavens they can stay in perfect unison. Today, we’re far luckier thanks to the invention of pitch-shifting and harmonization effects.
Earthquaker Devices Rainbow Machine
Caroline Hawaiian Pizza
One guitarist can shred a lead melody and it can be copied and pitch-shifted to a certain interval or octave and recombined with the original, all in real time.
Not only do we get the benefit as individual instrumentalists of having an enhanced sound to draw more attention to our performances, but our band benefits too from the illusion of having an additional band member and a thicker, more enticing soundscape for their songs.
Gamechanger Audio Light Pedal
The harmonizer effect is a sub-type of the pitch shift effect, in which the pitch of a sound is lowered or raised. Although this can be any number of cents when using software plugins, pitch shifter pedals transpose notes by specific musical intervals for ease of use.
Caroline Guitar Somersault
EarthQuaker Devices Hummingbird V4
Unlike the older octave pedals, harmonizers can transpose to any number of intervals and not just up or down octaves. This was originally achieved by playing sounds back at different speeds than they were originally recorded, but the effect is no longer tied to time in this fashion.
Harmonizers, on the other hand, maintain the original sound and combine it with a pitch-shifted version. For instance, if you set your pedal to harmonize at a major third interval the duplicated sound will be shifted up four semitones.
FLAMMA FV03 Voice Changing
Caline G Series Orca
Today’s “smart harmonizers” can accept the key you’re playing in as an input in order to make sure your harmonies are always consonant. The result is a pleasing stacking of melodies that play in perfect time together, serving to thicken your tone and the soundscape of the song in general.
The assumption here is that you’re looking for a harmonizer for your guitar, keyboard, or other instrument, as opposed to one for vocals. Vocal harmonizers include a lot more features not directly applicable to your instrument and their prices can go through the roof. Knowing the difference can save you a lot of grief.
Beetronics Swarm Fuzz Harmonizer
TC-Helicon VoiceLive Play
In the current playing field, the main feature I suggest you make sure you have is key tracking. As mentioned above, old harmonizers weren’t “smart” like the new ones are, meaning they’d take your directions too literally and often play out of tune.
There’s nothing worse than a dissonant note popping out where it shouldn’t be. It’s the exact way listeners who don’t know music theory try to identify amateurs.
Smart harmonizers can accept a key as an input and understand that when you tell it to harmonize at a specific interval that it should still only use notes in the key. This feature is a must.
TC-Helicon Duplicator Vocal Effects
WHERE TO PLACE IT IN THE SIGNAL CHAIN
There’s a logical order for your guitar pedals based on what happens in nature. Anything else sounds unnatural and unpleasing to the ears. The order follows this setup:
Caline CP-511 Enchanted Tone
NUX NDD-7 TAPE ECHO
UNDERSTANDING THE KNOB SETTINGS
These days with smart harmonizers that can lock into key for you (a great, must-have feature in modern pedals), you’ll often see pedals with tiny LCD screens or a series of LED lights helping you navigate through various options.
EarthQuaker Devices Sea Machine V3
TC-Helicon VoiceLive 2
Those will differ from pedal to pedal but largely help you choose which key to lock into as well as which voicing to harmonize. Others take care of this with knobs. Let’s look at the general knobs that are similar across all options.
The most important knob you’ll see is often called Harmony or Type. These both let you choose which voicing to use, often labeled as high, higher, low, lower, octaves, unison, etc. Many have a built-in Reverb knob to let you dial that in if you don’t have a dedicated unit.
FLAMMA FV02 Vocal Pedal
EarthQuaker Devices Organizer
The other important knob is Level, which lets you define how loud the harmonized line is in comparison to your lead. You’ll often see this labeled as Blend, Mix, or Balance. Many allow you to save presets too, which you’ll find buttons for. Another common option, like reverb, is the Tone knob to control the brightness of the outputted signal.
And of course, whether through a knob or a screen, you’ll find the Key option to select which musical key you’re playing in so your harmonized lines are always consonant and pleasing to the ear.
The Big Dipper Harmonizer
Recommended Harmonizer Pedals
Boss PS-6 Harmonist Pedal
Meet the new BOSS HARMONIST, with four intelligent pitch-shift effects and three-voice harmony in one convenient unit. Among the effect modes are harmony, pitch shifter, and detune, Plus the all-new super Bend for authentic pedal-bending effects and wild three- and four-octave pitch sweeps.
TC Helicon VOICETONE H1
Single-button stompbox gives you great sounding guitar controlled harmony
Adds 1 or 2 voices of realistic vocal harmony set manually or guided by your guitar
No theory needed just play your guitar through VOICETONE H1 to automatically create great sounding harmony
TC Electronic Quintessence Harmonizer
Exceptional dual-voiced intelligent harmony pedal with innovative pressure-sensitive footswitch
Groundbreaking MASH technology turns footswitch into a pressure-responsive expression controller
TC Helicon HARMONY SINGER
Vocal effects stompbox featuring guitar-controlled harmony and reverb plus battery-powered operation
Koogo Harmonizer Digital
Up: Outputs a precise polyphonic pitch shifting voice.
Detune: It slightly shifts the pitch and mixes it back with the original signal to create a chorus-like effect, it rings a lot of nice space feeling.
Down: It shifts the pitch and mixes it back with the original signal to create a rich harmonic voice.
Stax Guitar Harmonizer
3 Effects Knobs and 1 Switch are accurate and high sensitive.
The Range of Detune Mode is: -25/-20/-15/-10/-5/0/+5/+10/+15/+20/+25 cents.
Up: Outputs a precise polyphonic pitch shifting voice
FLAMMA FV04 Harmony Vocal Processor
The FV04 Harmony is the first effects pedal from Flamma aimed at vocalists and guitarists. It happily accepts guitar or microphone inputs and includes dedicated reverb effects for each.
On the vocal side, the Harmony provides 11 different harmony modes to choose from and can comfortably shift between major and minor scales for ultimate pitch flexibility.
