Question about pitching software

B

benyamind

New member
Hi,

I'm looking for a tool that can accurately shift the pitch of a whole .wav file. Not like auto-tune or any other program based on isolating sounds and pitching them. I literally mean a whole .wav

Some tool that keeps the quality of your file, doesn't stretch it, but can shift the pitch (preferably with three zeros behind the dot). I found some tools but they're a bit crappy. One of 'm was decent but you literally gotta wait for it to render the whole thing before you can listen to it. In this fashion you can't mess around and play.

Reason I need such a tool, vst, or whatever, is because recently I started digging into pitch. I found that 440Hz for A is standarized pitch (literally all vst's and what not are based on 440Hz for A. However, some types of eastern music use 432 Hz (they say that's magical property but I don't buy into that). I did however listen to more music in slight alternations to the standard 440Hz = A pitch, and a whole new world opened up. I want to experiment with pitch to see what kind of feeling it can give to my compositions.

So, I need a trustworthy tool of quality. Does any one know such a tool?

Thanks in advance,

peace
 
Most DAW's have such a pitch control.

I think even the free Audacity does. I could be wrong tho.

What software are you using?
 
I'm using Fruity Loops.

And I also have Audacity, and I was referring to that program. The workflow is soooo slow. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I need it to
instantly change slight changes I make to the pitch in order for me to work with it. Otherwise the process is way to lenghty.

How would you approach pitching a whole .wav in FL? In the standard FL pop up of that track it only allows you to do .10 steps (correct me If I'm wrong). And the master pitch at the top doesn't seem to work on wav files.

If you could help me out great man

peace
 
Well I do not use FL. My son did tho.

I am quite surprised there isn't an easy way in FL to do this. That kinda what I felt he used it for. Meaning manipulation of loops. Audacity is not a multitrack DAW. It is a free audio editor. You get what you pay for in regards to options on how to manipulate shizz.

In Cubase I can change pitch of any track and preview the change of a 15 second example immediately. It does take a bit to process the whole track though. Like 10 seconds for a 5 minute track.

If this is a thing you need to do on a regular basis, then may need to buy software that allows it.

Sorry, I don't know of a free VST or software that can do that on the fly. Maybe someone else does. Best!
 
What about Riffstation? I've never tried it myself, so I don't know if you have to run an MP3 or other audio file through "pre-processing," or if you can just change the pitch and/or tempo right off the bat, but it's free to try.

EDIT: PS -- There's nothing magical or "correct" about 440.0 Hz tuning. It turns out that the A above Middle C has had many different tunings over the years and in other countries.

I don't know about the 432 Hz tuning, but one supposedly "mystical" or "cosmic" tuning is based on using 256 Hz for Middle C. I'm not sure where it came from, but 256 is a power of 2, so if you keep going down an octave-- which divides the frequency by 2-- you will eventually get to 1 Hz, so my personal suspicion is that the 256 Hz tuning came about because of this simple "power of 2" fact.

Of course, it's kind of silly to claim that there's something magical about 256 Hz, such as some theory about the vibrational frequency of the universe (shades of Fringe and its alternate universes!). If you stop and think about it, such ideas are predicated on the assumption that there's something special about 1 second, since Hertz is a measure of cycles per second. But there's not really anything special about 1 second, because it comes from taking the average length of a day on planet Earth (which changes over time), then dividing a day into 24 hours, then dividing an hour into 60 minutes, then dividing a minute into 60 seconds.
 
Last edited:
Samplers like Kontakt and Structure have a variety of ways to adjust pitch. I haven't used pitch-shifting the way you want to but I think that most DAWS that handle samples have some native plugin that does this. In your case, retuning would involve "cents" ( 0.01 semitone ).

Inexpensive:

Plug And Mix / Pitch Me - Audio Plug-ins Store - DontCrack

Modulator | Homegrown Sounds

I suspect that Eventide (or someone elso) would have something that would fit the bill. Make some inquiries.

Another issue you're going to run into might be rescaling. This is usually a synthesizer feature.

Paj
8^)
 
SeaGtGruff said:
What about Riffstation? I've never tried it myself, so I don't know if you have to run an MP3 or other audio file through "pre-processing," or if you can just change the pitch and/or tempo right off the bat, but it's free to try.

EDIT: PS -- There's nothing magical or "correct" about 440.0 Hz tuning. It turns out that the A above Middle C has had many different tunings over the years and in other countries.

I don't know about the 432 Hz tuning, but one supposedly "mystical" or "cosmic" tuning is based on using 256 Hz for Middle C. I'm not sure where it came from, but 256 is a power of 2, so if you keep going down an octave-- which divides the frequency by 2-- you will eventually get to 1 Hz, so my personal suspicion is that the 256 Hz tuning came about because of this simple "power of 2" fact.

Of course, it's kind of silly to claim that there's something magical about 256 Hz, such as some theory about the vibrational frequency of the universe (shades of Fringe and its alternate universes!). If you stop and think about it, such ideas are predicated on the assumption that there's something special about 1 second, since Hertz is a measure of cycles per second. But there's not really anything special about 1 second, because it comes from taking the average length of a day on planet Earth (which changes over time), then dividing a day into 24 hours, then dividing an hour into 60 minutes, then dividing a minute into 60 seconds.
Click to expand...

You obviously regret not taking the BLUE pill. ;)
 
I've pitch corrected instruments using Autotune. If you know how to use the controls you can get a creaky door to sound like Barbra Streisand. How do you think Cher had a career after 1989?
 
Another issue with any pitch correction will be how the base/root note affects all the other notes in the scale. Anyone that has played a twelve-string that is tuned down 3 or 4 half-steps quickly realizes that there are tuning issues with other guitars in standard tuning that a capo will not fix. It's a math and physics thing. Again, I don't use a lot of pitch correction and especially the way the OP wants to but I would guess that quality pitch correction software would address this issue.

Paj
8^)

BTW: from back in the day, when this meant something entirely different"
"I've never had problems with the blue pills."
---Bill Murray in "Where The Buffalo Roam"
 
Microtuning is totally un-noticed by the vast majority of listeners. Keeping in mind that digital tuners are quite a recent phenomenon, there is really no basis for any special kind of mega-frequency accuracy. The only time it ever mattered was when tunable instruments had to be played alongside fixed ones. Pianos and organs in the main. Tuning accuracy by beat tuning works really well at lower frequencies, but is much less effective as the pitch being matched is higher. If you look at a bass - and beat tune an open string to the fifth on the string below, the beating is obvious and pretty easy for even untrained ears. Try it on the two identical top E's on a 12 string and it's different - the speed of the beating increases quickly into a chorus. Most guitars with conventional frets are going to have inaccurate tuning up and down the neck. How many recordings over the years have been technically out of tune? Probably most of them. The quest for some kind of perfect tuning is to all intents and purposes a pointless exercise. I love the OP's requirement to shift frequency by '000' of a Hz. In fact, I often wonder how accurate our actual sync generator is? 48K or 44.1K? It only takes the source to be slightly off and playback of somebody else's recording will be out of tune! Real time frequency shifting is never going to be simple because the processing takes a finite time to do.
 
Cheers for all the reactions. Some insightful thoughts.

Yeah, I'm aware that pitch-shifting one file will not achieve accurate tuning because of the math, intervals etc.

And yeah, 432 Hz is not 'aligned with the cosmos', because as you said it's based of a second. Second; completely man-made, initially based of fluctuating cycles in nature.

I simply wanted to mess around with it, because even though you might mess up the intervals, it could lead to interesting effects.
 
If you just want something to audition pitch-shifted mp3 tracks on the fly you could use something like PerfectPractice.

Paj
8^)
 
there is a pitch shift plugin that comes with pro tools, but it might cause some artifacts.
For me it works pretty well, but it can mess up if you try to shift bass frequencies. It does not work well if you try to shift basslines.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top