TRUE CONFESSIONS TIME. You sing in the shower, don't you? (come on, come on, admit it: you do it, I do it, we all do it. When the water's roaring we all think we're Pavarotti.) And that's where you get some of your best musical ideas, right? Not with your hands on a guitar or a piano, but with your own throat scatting up and down the scales. Makes sense, that. The voice was the first instrument. It's a straighter line to the heart... and besides, everything sounds great. The shower is the ultimate in analogue reverbs.

But outside the shower most of us are more reticent, with good reason. Like wandering pitch: when the G in your head comes out anywhere from E to B, willy-nilly, why bother? Or, if you can sing accurately, there's the undeniable fact that voice is only voice: you can't sing a drum or synth part, except to teach it to a player.

A shame, though, to lose all those great ideas, the ones forgotten between the shower and the studio...

Enter the Pitchrider 2000, designed in Canada by IVL Technologies and marketed by Cherry Lane. It's a $600 box that will solve your pitch problems (if anything can) and open up a whole new set of approaches to composing, rehearsing, and performing.

And not just for voice, either, but for any instrument. Read on.

WHAT IT IS

The Pitchrider 2000 is a compact, lightweight, grey plastic box with a blue laminate front. The front panel has three buttons for changing modes and settings, a built-in microphone, and a set display that will outblink anything in your set-up (a real joy to those into studio flash). The back panel has four jacks: external mike, headphones, AC power (it doesn't use batteries), and MIDI OUT.

WHAT IT DOES

Put simply, the Pitchrider analyses the incoming signal and decides what pitch it is, then tells you so in a set of displays (including octave, pitch, and how sharp or flat the signal is within two-hundredths of a semitone). At the same time, it duplicates that "proper" pitch as an audio signal and the earphone jack and MIDI note-on data at the MIDI OUT jack.

WHAT IT'S GOOD FOR

Four things, basically — intonation training for voice or any instrument (particularly acoustic instruments, like flutes and violins, where intonation can get tricky); driving MIDI synths and drum machines from voice or acoustic and electric instruments (including non-MIDI keyboards and tuned percussion); recording into MIDI sequencers; and precise tuning of any instrument.

HOW IT WORKS

Let's start with intonation training. To learn you need feedback. The more direct the feedback, the faster you learn. Simple. The problem with learning to sing or play on pitch is that (discounting the pained looks on your instructor's face) feedback is usually nil. But with the Pitchrider you get plenty. First, you see the octave and name of the note you're actually producing. Second, the bargraph shows you how sharp or flat you are. Stay in the green area — plus or minus 12 cents of the actual pitch — and you are "in tune" for all practical purposes. Third, it gives you audio feedback over the earphone jacks, playing the proper pitch so you can lock in on it.

At intonation training, the Pitchrider is superb. And embarrassing, at least at first, because it doesn't allow you any illusions.

Next use: driving MIDI synths. Once you've developed and programmed a device to analyse pitch accurately, why not have it send out MIDI note on/off data too? At this the Pitchrider is good within certain limitations. For one, you'll get better results if you bypass the built-in mike and use, instead, an external microphone of high quality (preferably one that's highly directional, to keep out extraneous sounds).

For another, you want to avoid any audio feedback. The Pitchrider is strictly limited to monophonic input. Anything else confuses it and you'll get glitches and runaway notes. So monitor your MIDI devices through headphones.

Lastly, there are limits imposed by physics. The Pitchrider takes 10 microseconds plus two cycles of a waveform to identify a pitch, so that as you play or sing lower, and wavecycles get longer, response time will start to lag accordingly. (One way around that — play or sing high, but transpose your synths down to where you need them.)

Under controlled studio conditions, the Pitchrider is a fine MIDI driver. I've successfully triggered networks of MIDI synths with voice, penny whistle, viola, electric guitar, Farfisa organ, and Minimoog. Best results on the stringed instruments came when I skipped microphones entirely and fed a direct pickup signal into the Pitchrider, sometimes aided by a pre-amp; it also helped to mute unused strings and, of course, stay strictly monophonic. On stage, however, isolating the Pitchrider's input so you get glitch-free output is a lot tougher... and yet today's problem can be tomorrow's special effect; I've used the "freakout mode" successfully in concert, telling stories and letting my speech and the feedback from audience response drive a DX7 at random. The result — unpredictable pitches in perfect rhythm with the room — worked beautifully.

Next use: as an input device to MIDI sequencers it is subject to all the limitations mentioned above... but so what? I edit out the glitches later. And it's an absolute gas to be able to sing a batch of vocal lines, just like in the shower, moving straight from the moment of inspiration to a 90% usable MIDI recorded take.

Final use: precise tuning. Not its intended purpose, but an excellent bonus. The bargraph is a hell of a lot easier to read than any strobe tuner I've ever used.

EXTRAS

Behind the simple front panel and basic operation there are nine modes you access by repeatedly pressing the Mode button on the front panel. These expand the Pitchrider's usefulness by a considerable margin. They include a Reference mode, which lets you tune to pre-existing material or other standards by changing the unit's A from 440 to anything between 413 and 475; a Bottom Octave mode which lets you set the unit to ignore anything below a certain pitch, freeing it from glitches caused by room noise; a Key mode which sets whether you'll see accidentals as flats or sharps in the display; a MIDI Channel mode which lets you choose which of the 16 possible channels the MIDI Out data will be sent on; MIDI Velocity, MIDI Aftertouch, and MIDI Pitchbend modes, which allow you to make your synths track your singing volume, duration, and pitch bends (if they accept these types of MIDI data); and finally Input Sensitivity and Response Time modes. These two modes finetune the responsiveness of the unit. Players and singers whose pitch control is less certain will want to lower the input sensitivity and lengthen the response time.

CONCLUSION:

The Pitchrider 2000 is a nifty box. Not for everybody, but vital to people who are serious about improving their intonation; and extremely useful (though not yet perfect, mostly due to limitations imposed by the laws of physics) for folks who want to do MIDI work from non-MIDI instruments.

It's well-priced, too. The only competition on the horizon, Fairlight's Voicetracker, is going to be at least four times as expensive when it finally makes its belated arrival this autumn.

PITCHRIDER 2000 Pitch to MIDI converter: $600

CONTACT: IVL Technologies, (Contact Details).

Cherry Lane Technologies, (Contact Details).