Pitch Glide is one of the most effective ways we can add interest and flavour to our chord progressions. But implementing it can take a bit of work; a bit of synthesis over here, or a bit of pitch wheel gymnastics over there.
TLDR; I created a little patch in Logic Pro to make it easier. You can learn more about it below and download it here.
So what is pitch glide anyways?
Well, its other name is Pitch Modulation, which is actually more useful in helping us understand. To “modulate” is to regulate, control or adapt. And in this case Pitch Modulation describes the control of pitch.
With Pitch Modulation, we can affect and control the pitch of a sound, starting at one pitch and ending at another. And gospel musicians and R&B producers have been making use of this trick for decades. You’ve heard it on songs from Darkchild and you’ve definitely heard it on live performances.
In R&B, we typically alter the pitch at the beginning of a chord, pitching down an octave or two before smoothly pitching up to the chord’s original pitch.
How to add pitch glide to chords?
There are many ways you can add Pitch Glide to your chords, the easiest way is by riding the pitch bend wheel on your keyboard. The only problem with this is that you need three hands if you’re trying to play lush R&B chords along with it. Unless you’re able to record in the MIDI data after the fact, which works for the studio and not for live.
Either way, if you’re like me, you’d prefer to play everything live in your studio sessions. For that, sound design is the next solution.
Whilst some VSTs like Universal Audio’s PolyMAX Synth have a Pitch Mod knob (yes they stole my name, or maybe it just wasn’t that original), others like Serum let you assign pitch to an envelope.
Tools to add pitch glide
Then there are dedicated tools for it. Gospel Musicians just came out with a plugin called Glide. It lets you add this effect to any sound, MIDI or even audio. I haven’t tried it myself as of writing this update, but from what I’ve seen, it looks and sounds really good. The only problem is that it’s pretty expensive.
I created my own tool long before Glide called Pitch MOD. It’s for Logic Pro and uses Logic’s Modulator MIDI FX to modulate the pitch of your input. It only works with MIDI, but it does a pretty good job.