New Music Gear Monday: Boz Digital Labs ProVocative Micro-Pitch Shifter Plugin

One of the coolest tricks I learned as a young mixing pup was micro-pitch shifting. This technique to thicken up a vocal required 2 Harmonizers, with one tuned up by 5 to 8 cents and the other tuned down by the same amount. As you mixed the effect in, you could thicken up any vocal or instrument while widening it out using the effects return pan controls. Obviously that required a lot of expensive horsepower that can be done in software today, since there are some great pitch shifter plugins available. The problem is that you still need two plugins to get the same effect as you have to pitch the signal both up and down. Boz Digital Labs wanted to make this simpler and launched ProVocative, a new micro-shift plugin that makes adding the pitch up/down effect to any channel dead easy.

ProVocative has 3 main controls. The most important is the large Pitch control in the middle that automatically shifts the pitch both up and down simultaneously so you can dial in the effect instantly. On the left is a Width control which provides hard left and right panning of the effect when set at 100%, and moves both sides closer to the center as it gets closer to zero. You can actually go all the way to -100% as well, which sends the effect to the opposite sides. A Delay control can be set anywhere from 20 to 150 milliseconds to control the amount of thickening up to a simple slapback effect.

On the bottom of the plug you’ll find separate wet and dry controls which can be set to blend the desired amount of each signal, or set it to full effect. There’s also a link control that will link the two together. An output control completes the input/output section. Finally there’s a unique filter control with 2 overlapping 12dB per octave filter sliders in order to filter the effect that also acts as a signal indicator.

Boz Digital Labs ProVocative is just $49 complete with a trial period. It’s available for both Mac and PC in all popular plugin formats. Check out the dedicated page and the video below for more info.