How to Create a High/Low Pitch Voice in Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2019

Changing the pitch of a voice is useful for all kinds of projects. Think about Star Wars. Every creature has a different way of speaking. Some have deep, rumbling voices while others are high and squeaky. Creating those voices naturally would be difficult, so instead we let the software help us out.

Beyond character voices, pitch shifting is also useful for disguising a voice, creating comedic effects, or building unique sound design. Today we are going to go over how to change voice pitch in Adobe Premiere Pro CC using the Pitch Shifter effect.

How to Change Voice Pitch in Premiere Pro

1. Get an audio clip into your sequence that you want to modify. This can be dialogue, a voiceover, or any audio with vocals.
2. Go to the Effects panel and search for Pitch Shifter. Make sure you select the regular version, not the one marked (Obsolete).
3. Drag the Pitch Shifter effect onto your audio clip.
4. Go to Effect Controls and find the Pitch Shifter effect.
5. Click the Edit button to open the Pitch Shifter interface.
6. Adjust the Semi-Tones and Cents values to shift the pitch. Higher values create a higher pitched voice, lower values create a deeper voice. For reference, one semi-tone equals 100 cents, so cents give you finer control.
7. Change the Precision setting to High Precision for the best quality. The default setting can introduce some artifacts, especially with larger shifts.

How to Animate the Pitch

If you want the pitch to change over time, maybe transitioning from normal to deep within a scene, you can animate it with keyframes.

1. In Effect Controls, expand the Pitch Shifter section and drop down the Individual Parameters.
2. Find the Transpose Ratio property and click the stopwatch to enable keyframes.
3. Set the starting value at one point in time and a different value at another. Premiere Pro will smoothly transition between them.

Higher ratio values equal a higher pitch, and lower values create a deeper voice.

Tips

• Keep shifts subtle for realistic results. Going more than 3 or 4 semi-tones in either direction starts to sound robotic. For character voices, that might be what you want, but for natural-sounding dialogue, stay in the 1-2 range.
• Combine with other audio effects. After shifting the pitch, you can add effects like echo and reverb to build a more complete character voice.
• EQ can help. If the shifted audio sounds thin or muddy, use an EQ effect to clean up the frequencies.

That’s it for this effect. It is really easy to do in Premiere Pro and opens up a lot of creative possibilities for your audio work.