Crystallizer: Granular Pitch-Shift Echo Plugin by Soundtoys

The effect is designed around the classic Crystal Echoes sound from the Eventide H3000. Soundtoys says its founders designed algorithms for the original hardware, and the plugin keeps its old-school pitch shifting. Rather than the smooth processing of modern pitch shifters, this approach uses a simpler resample and crossfade method that introduces audible artifacts. That glitchy quality is central to the sound.

The filters let you push the output toward bright, shimmering blooms or darker, richer beds of sound, so the same core effect can serve very different textures.

Crystallizer can lock its echoes to your project tempo through MIDI sync, and you can add custom automation for movement over time. The built-in Gate and Duck feature gives you dynamic control over when echoes are triggered, which helps keep the effect in check when it gets wild.

The plugin includes more than 200 presets, grouped into categories ranging from subtle to psychedelic, and provides enough control to build your own presets from them.