N-track should have it, MTS does
The quote from Multitrackstudio home page explains what I really like to have in N-track (and why).
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| This control works just like a tape recorder’s speed control: if speed increases pitch will go up, if speed decreases pitch will go down. If you want to record an instrument and its pitch is different from your song’s pitch you can use the VariSpeed control to change the song’s pitch. After recording the track you can set the VariSpeed control to zero and the recorded track’s pitch will be equal to the song’s pitch. |
I’m not willing to jump in any ships, but it looks like an easy task for someone as hard working and talented guy like Flavio.
After that the N-track would be just perfect for me.
interesting idea, but isn’t the end result of that process the same as using a pitch plugin on the recorded track? i guess the difference would be that it would sound “in tune” while recording…
there’s been a couple of situations where i’ve thought a “scrub” feature would be useful, but generally if i’m having pitch or tuning issues i don’t notice it until the mixing phase or when it comes time to do vocals, and it’s just a slight adjustment needed.
any specific instruments or situations where you see yourself using this?
Just tune your instruments properly before recording.
If it’s too late and the new instrument to be recorded is out as compared with the song, then just re-tune your instrument to the current song pitch.
Re-tuning is easy if it’s a guitar or a keyboard. Probably not so easy if it’s an acoustic piano or a recorder say. Some wind instruments can be adjusted for pitch though.
Eyup!
I think this refers to adding instruments to a MIDI track and being able to adjust the pitch of the midi to your instument.
You can do this in NTrack, but only in semitone steps.
Steve
| Quote (dimmer77 @ Nov. 09 2005,08:55) |
| interesting idea, but isn’t the end result of that process the same as using a pitch plugin on the recorded track? i guess the difference would be that it would sound “in tune” while recording… |
You nailed the difference. It’s bloody irritating to play an isntrument in diiferent pitch than the base track.
In addition the sound of the instrument changes quite a lot when using pitch shift. It goes really bad.
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| any specific instruments or situations where you see yourself using this? |
My acoustic piano is the usual suspect. It’s tuned at the beginning of the heating season very year - so it’s in tune during the winter and goes lower when summer and humidity comes.
Also when the base track is (for various reasons) in somewhere else than in standard pitch the function would be handy.
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| Just tune your instruments properly before recording. |
And I use to do that quite often with tape recorders. I want to do it with N-track too
| Quote (Beefy Steve @ Nov. 09 2005,09:07) |
| I think this refers to adding instruments to a MIDI track and being able to adjust the pitch of the midi to your instument. You can do this in NTrack, but only in semitone steps. |
Actually it doesn't refer to just miditracks in MTS. I works on real thing too. Semitones are bit to rude for tuning.
n-Track does have “alter song speed”, but whenever I’ve tried to use it, it didn’t do quite what I was intending at the time.
n-Track also has a pitch-shift plugin that’s pretty darn good for a plugin. You could apply it on a submix of backing tracks so your piano is in tune with them, and record your piano. Then pitch shift the piano track using a wave editor (which usually does a better job than n-Track’s plugin, which is somewhat limited in how it can work since it runs in real-time). However, I still haven’t found a good cheap or free pitch shifter. I guess I’ll have to pop for GoldWave or something like that. The ones I try either have noticeable artifacts in the sound, or else they cause subtle but nasty timing shifts. Audacity garbles the track terribly (IMHO). CoolEdit96 sounds the best but causes timing shifts. I had some trouble with r8brain (though not r8brain pro) though I don’t remember specifically what it was. I do remember that I had to either give up or compromise what I was trying to do.
HTH 
| Quote (learjeff @ Nov. 09 2005,18:39) |
| I had some trouble with r8brain (though not r8brain pro) though I don't remember specifically what it was. |
r8brain only does bit/sample rate converion I thought?
Vari-speed can come in handy, and not so much for intonation control. If your guitar track is out, then you really should tune the thing and try again. There are a few instruments though, mostly reed organs and melodicas and stuff like them, that can easily be in tune with themselves, but not with the rest of the world. These things are next to impossible to tune to any kind of standard pitch. You either gotta tune everything else to the questionable instrument, or record pitchshifted.
Another example that’s come up for me is certain brass instruments. I’ve had people trying to lay down something like a euphonium part on a song that was simply in the wrong key for euphonium. That or the range of the instrument was just a bit wrong for the song in question. Vari-speed is a great help in these situations.
I have no idea whether this is easily implimented in n-Track code. ProTools requires an outboard Digidesign sync device for it to work. It’s extremely precise and leaves no artifacts. It’s also extremely expensive. Very cool tool to have though…
I’ve had people trying to lay down something like a euphonium part on a song that was simply in the wrong key for euphonium. That or the range of the instrument was just a bit wrong for the song in question"
Brass instruments are often tuned differently to what most people are used to.
‘Concert pitch’ A is 440Hz, as most people know an A. An ‘A’ on a saxophone or trumpet is often a semitone or two different, but still called an A. These instruments are not usually tuned to concert pitch.
Why they have a different concept of tuning on brass sintruments, I don’t know. It would be better I think to have a ‘absolute’ tuning for all instruments, where an A is always 440Hz.
JW
| Quote (J.W. @ Nov. 10 2005,05:21) |
| Why they have a different concept of tuning on brass sintruments, I don't know. It would be better I think to have a 'absolute' tuning for all instruments, where an A is always 440Hz. |
This A = 440 hz is relatively new concept. And most symphonic orchestras tune to higher pitches (442, 445 etc) nowadays.
The concert pitch has been going higher and higher basically.
Some instruments sound better in the key they're typically tuned into. Some periodic instruments that is used on old music (renessance etc) even may brake up if they're tuned to standard pitch (the refernence A might be as low as 425!).
So there's various reasons there's lot of tuning systems, but the main thing it sounds cool.
And causes nuisance 
In rennaisance times there can’t have been a standardised system of tuning (not to mention Equal Temperament - which hadn’t been discovered yet…). There have been a lot of variations in standard concert pitch over the centuries, where A has at times been 409Hz, 435Hz, and so on. 440Hz is now the global standard, but seeing as the oboe is the instrument the orchestra tunes to, it is assumed the oboe was tuned correctly in the first place…which may or not be the case.
However, I was reffering to something different: an exact shift, a by a semitone, or a tone, or more, by modern brass instruments as compared to a concert pitch tuned instrument, e.g. guitar or piano. These brass instruments are not out by a quarter or a fifth, or 2 9/16 of a tone etc - they are out by exact multiples of whole tones / semitones. Therefore they can still play in a band, but a brass instrumentalist’s concept of a note will be shifted as compared to everyone else’s concept of the same note.
For example - if I can rememeber - an F played on my bass guitar, to the sax player would be a G, which is what it also said on his his sheet music (which had been written specially for his type of saxophone). When communicating I had to mentally translate to his tuning. Apparently there can be saxes in A, and saxes in Bb etc. This is so because the sax’s fingering is the same in each case, but the sax is altered in design to be emit a different key.
It can be confusing, which is why I think a absolute tuning system would be better. Of course, if the sax player is worth his oats, you wouldn’t be need to disucuss notes too much as he’d be able to learn and improvise easily. Maybe the roman numerals system would be better, as you don’t need to worry about keys and shifting tunings…though i’ve yet to meet someone who uses this system.
I only mention this because of clavastudio’s problems with brass instruments. I was digressing from the original thread about varispeed… 
Hey guys this is good stuff. We have to deal with this all the time at church when we want to write out horn charts for guys/gals sitting in on horns. In standard tuning, (A=440hz) I know if I play a C on guitar, Trumpet dude has to play B flat and Sax dude has to play an E flat. It is my understanding that the construction on the horn determines its “key” or tuning. A B flat trumpet for example is always gonna be a B flat trumpet. There is a slide on the horn for fine adjustments but thats about it. What we do is play the horn part into notation software with a MIDI keyboard, transpose and print. This usually works well but sometimes notes have to be tweaked when they are outside the playable range of the horn or horn player.
Of course I may have it all WRONG 
but this works for us.
TG
gtr4him - I see you’ve experienced the same, and producing transposed charts is no doubt the best way to go.
But why do brass players learn the “wrong notes”? Why can’t they learn absolute note names? And stick to them.
There’s probably a vaild reason, historical or otherwise.
Actually I’ve just had a look at Wikipedia -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_%28music%29
- thows a little light on the subject.
JW
I would very much like to have varispeed, even if it’s already possible to get the same thing using pitchshifting plug in , or whatever. It would make life a bit easier when recording my hammond, which is just a tad flat and there is no way I’m going to figure out how to tune it.
Also, what if the varispeed function itself could be hooked to an oscillator? Wouldn’t we then be able to reproduce a famous vocal effect quite easily? Nah, a plug in will work for that well enough, I guess…
| Quote (J.W. @ Nov. 10 2005,10:55) |
| gtr4him - I see you've experienced the same, and producing transposed charts is no doubt the best way to go. But why do brass players learn the "wrong notes"? Why can't they learn absolute note names? And stick to them. There's probably a vaild reason, historical or otherwise. Actually I've just had a look at Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_%28music%29 - thows a little light on the subject. JW |
That does shed some light JW. Thanks for the link.
TG -- tuned A440
I’m learning more as I find out more… It seems brass horns have fundamental notes - i.e. notes that can be played without valves and sliders, just the horn and the mouth. I think these notes are usually the root, third and fifth notes or intervals. So adding valves/sliders helps get the other notes. Generally a brass instrument will be suited for one key. Or at least, other keys are possible, but will be more awkward to play.
But I’m still wondering why horn players can’t just learn one set of notes (i.e. concert pitch scales).
Anyway…gotta go…
Later…
JW
| Quote (Bubbagump @ Nov. 09 2005,21:58) | ||
r8brain only does bit/sample rate converion I thought?
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Same thing, different perspective.
1) Keep he pitch constant but change the sample rate.
2) Keep the sample rate constant but change the pitch.
Same transform, you're just doing something different with the results. In case 1, you play it back with a different sample rate. Case 2, you don't. Yes, you have to get the math right to figure out how to do one using a tool for the other, and that's where I usually mess up! In any case, r8brain seems to work well for shifts between popular rates, and not so well for tiny shifts.
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| But I’m still wondering why horn players can’t just learn one set of notes (i.e. concert pitch scales). |
Prolly the same reason piano players hate songs that require heavy use of the black keys. VERY awkward to play.
A lot of guitar players whip the capo out when a song is in a key unfriendly to open positions or have awkward fingerings. Since 99.999% of my playing these days is at church and a HUGE number of the songs/hymns we play are in these guitar “un-friendly” keys PLUS the fact that I HATE fumbling with a capo, I have forced myself to learn more chord shapes so that I can play in any key anywhere on the fretboard. Just because a guitar has 6 (or 7) strings, that does not mean you have to hit all of 'em all the time!
I think my experiences playing at church have made me a better player and musician overall. Made me work at it harder.TG
PS Just to get back in the context of the thread… YES! Vari-speed would be a GREAT addition to n-Track. I can think of many uses for such a feature.