Harmonizer

a word trademarked by Eventide to describe their range of products that have pitch manipulation capabilities. In the early days of the company they were actually called Eventide Clockworks, which had to do with what some of the founders’ “day gigs” were. Back in 1975 they came out with their first Harmonizer (the H910). It had the ability to pitch shift audio in realtime (actually there were a few milliseconds of delay involved) up or down one octave. The product was a huge hit in studios and live sound, where it was used as much for doubling (simulating the sound of a double track) as actual pitch transposition. This is mostly due to the fact that the resulting quality of the transposed pitch was not very true to the sound of the original track as there were many digital artifacts created in the process, not to mention the resulting Darth Vader or Mickey Mouse effect caused mostly by transposing formants along with the pitch. For a doubling effect it sounding pretty good – distinctly different from the delays and choruses that had commonly been used before – and became a bit of a trademark sound in the late 1970’s. The rest is history. Eventide continued to build better and more sophisticated Harmonizers over the years and even though many of their features and concepts have been effectively copied their products remain on the cutting edge and their status in pro audio history is legendary. It should be noted that even though many people use the word Harmonizer as a generic term to denote any box that can effectively pitch shift audio in realtime Eventide guards this trademark very closely.