The H910 was set to a downshift setting of around -1 semitone, and the feedback was turned up to get the quick delays that shoot down in pitch. The snare sound also has some sort of gating on it, but you can clearly hear the Harmonizer on the first snare hits. Tony Visconti famously described the H910 to David Bowie and Brian Eno: “It fucks with the fabric of time!” Visconti used the H910 while recording Bowie’s “Low,” where it was used to create a snare drum sound that descended downwards, with the amount of pitch bend determined by how hard Dennis Davis hit the snare: Whatever the reason, the Harmonizer quickly made its way into recording studios around the world. Let’s face it, Harmonizer is a great name. The Varispeech was described in the literature as a way of time correcting speech, while the Harmonizer was sold from the get-go as something to generate musical harmonies. If I had to guess, it has something to do with marketing. So, why did the H910 become identified with pitch shifting, and the term “Harmonizer” become almost as generic as “Xerox” (at least in recording circles), while the Lexicon Varispeech faded into relative obscurity? I don’t know. The H910 appears to use a fairly simple triangle wave crossfading, which means that the 2 different delayed signals will be present to a greater or lesser extent in the output at virtually all times.
Like the Lexicon Varispeech that preceded it, the H910 would be what I would label a 2-tap pitch shifter, in that there were 2 pitch shifted signals, with crossfading between the 2 signals. In 1975, Eventide came out with their first Harmonizer, the H910:ĭesigned by Anthony Agnello (later of Princeton Digital), this was a digital variant of the rotary tape head pitch shifters that I discussed earlier.
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