Whether you’re looking to fix up a wayward vocal recording or get nuts with a drum loop, these time-warping, pitch-wrangling miracles of DSP design give you all the tools you need.

Celemony Melodyne 5

Without question Melodyne 5 is the most comprehensive pitch shifting and timestretching toolbox money can buy, Melodyne has established itself as the industry standard when it comes to meticulous transformation of monophonic and – thanks to its groundbreaking Direct Note Access (DNA) technology – polyphonic/multitimbral vocal and instrumental signals of any and all kinds.

Running standalone or as a plugin (VST, AU, AAX or ARA, the last offering greater integration with the host DAW than the others), Melodyne lets you freely move the individual notes and sounds within an audio signal around in the time and pitch domains, and tweak their volume levels, vibrato amounts, formants and more. It’s all made possible by a wonderfully intuitive and beautifully visualised editor interface, and recent (v5) additions to the feature list include sibilance detection and separation, and a dedicated Chord Track.

You’ll rarely feel as close to the bleeding edge of music technology as you do when reconfiguring the individual harmonic elements of a choir, string ensemble or guitar part using Melodyne’s liberating algorithmic arsenal, and although the trade-off is rather more required user input than the other entrants in our list, the results never fail to amaze.

Synchro Arts Revoice Pro 4

Synchro Arts’ sorcerous pitch and time manipulation system stands apart from the others in our list in that it’s built specifically for vocal production – although that’s not to say it isn’t also very effective on monophonic instrumental parts.

A standalone application that connects to your DAW for audio transfer via the Revoice Pro Link plugin, Revoice Pro 4 offers a range of processes for transforming, correcting, and doubling vocals and dialogue. Audio Performance Transfer (APT) can map the pitch profile, timing, and dynamics of one vocal track onto another; Doubler conjures amazingly natural double tracks from any monophonic input signal, with plenty of scopes for extreme pitch/time modification; and Warp enables automatic and manual editing of a clip’s timing and pitch contour, vibrato warping, and ‘ess’ and breath targeting for accurate de-essing.

Powerful, flexible, and staggeringly transparent, nothing else on the market can pull off the semi-automatic stunts that Revoice Pro 4 can. If you spend any significant time working with vocal tracks of any kind, it should be right at the top of your shopping list.

Waves SoundShifter

A venerable studio staple, SoundShifter might look positively archaic next to more modern alternatives, but its functionality is brilliantly focused, and the sheer quality of the sounds it produces can’t be faulted. Notably, it’s found a niche as something of a ‘secret weapon’ among EDM producers.

The package comprises three plugins: the ‘offline’ AudioSuite-only Parametric SoundShifter and Graphic SoundShifter, and the VST/AU/AAX-compatible SoundShifter Pitch. The last simply dials in up to an octave of pitch shifting in real time, using a variety of algorithms to conform the specifics to different types of source material, while the other two give far more control over the process, independently timestretching and/or pitch shifting by a fixed amount (Parametric) or varying amounts over time (Graphic).

Obviously, with all that AudioSuite goin’ on, this one’s mostly aimed at Pro Tools users. However, with it seemingly being on permanent sale (like much of the Waves catalogue these days), it’s potentially worth picking up by owners of other DAWs for the excellent SoundShifter Pitch alone.

Cableguys TimeShaper 2

One of eight ‘Shaper’ effects modules available within the extraordinary ShaperBox 2 plugin, TimeShaper 2 empowers you with absolute control of the temporal flow of your music. Central to all Shapers is Cableguys’ endlessly manipulable LFO editor, and in TimeShaper’s case, the X axis represents time, while the position of the LFO on the Y axis at any given moment determines the amount of timing offset applied at the output. This seemingly straightforward fundamental concept opens up a wealth of spectacular creative possibilities, from intricate beat rearrangement and elaborate reverse effects, to realistic vinyl-style scratching, tape stops, half-time effects, chorusing and much more.

Oh, and – again, like all Shapers – TimeShaper 2 is a multiband processor, so you can apply its warping effects completely independently across up to three discrete frequency ranges. It also increases in scope exponentially when you factor in its stablemate effects (VolumeShaper, FilterShaper Core, CrushShaper, DriveShaper, PanShaper, WidthShaper and the just-released NoiseShaper), which can all be added to ShaperBox 2 individually or en masse. Mind-bending!

Antares Auto-Tune Pro

No roundup of pitching software would be complete without the most famous (and, indeed, infamous) plugin of them all. Auto-Tune has been rescuing dodgy vocal and instrumental tracks for over two decades now, and the current flagship version, Auto-Tune Pro, presents copious options for straightening out – or, of course, radically mutating – monophonic melodies.

As ever, the eponymous Auto mode is the main event, doing a stunning job of snapping and bending notes in real time to a specified key and scale, or MIDI input. And when you need to get into the weeds, there’s the capture-based Graph mode, with which timing and tuning are non-destructively tweaked in a piano roll-style editor. It all comes together in a mature and tightly designed studio essential that’s not lost any of its appeal over the years.

zplane Elastique Pitch 2

From the developers of the pitch shifting and timestretching algorithms built in to numerous DAWs, including Ableton Live and Cubase, Elastique Pitch 2 centres on a big XY pad that alters the pitch of the input signal with movement of the puck on the Y axis and its ‘timbre’ (formant filters) on X, both up to an octave in either direction. It boasts unshakable phase coherence and the ability to shift up to eight channels at once – surround engineers rejoice! – and incorporates a delay effect with Freeze function, which sound designers will no doubt find useful. You can even ’play’ it with MIDI input, triggering stepped melodic pitch changes from your keyboard, and bending them up to two semitones with the pitch wheel.

Belying its simplistic appearance, Elastique Pitch 2 is a wildly creative and ergonomically efficient pitch shifter for music and media production, and, given zplane’s pedigree, it goes without saying that it never sounds less than stellar.

What’s your go-to software for making time and pitch submit to your musical will? Let us know in the comments.