An "invention:" ...shifting pitch to check mix?

[Obi-Wan zenabI]

I was reading the old SOS review of the powered avantone mix cubes and it occurred to me that a sufficiently accurate pitch shift applied to a mix might help identify mixing and balance errors due to nodes and other gremlins in the room and the monitors, etc.

You would be, in effect, altering the relative nodal patterns. I'm pretty much a hack at mixing, so my idea may be absurd for reasons y'all are sure to supply.

Has anyone done this, or have I invented something? Would a shift have to be unusably large to lift or drop the mix far enough? Should I keep my day job?

Any pitch shifting I have done with Cubase has been full of artifacts and weird sounds; there have to be better algorithms out there...

 

[ashcat_lt]

It's kind of a silly idea, but I can see where it might work. One way or another, it will definitely give you a different perspective on the mix. But, I don't think you can count on any of the "resynthesis" type pitch-shifting algorithms out there because they will not likely have enough in common with the actual mix to be useful, or at least I would find them highly suspect. In Reaper, you can change the master playrate of the project and if "preserve pitch..." is disabled, it acts very much like varispeed on a tape machine. It probably does a little more than just playing back the samples faster than they were recorded - there must be some interpolation - but it's not anywhere near as ugly and weird as other ways of doing it. Yes, it will also play back faster or slower, but I don't see that as a big problem here.

 

[miroslav]

I don't see how it would be of any use...hearing something completely different, in order to make decisions for the original mix.

You would be changing the mix...and therefore what you would be hearing would not be the mix...it would be something else....so any perspectives/decisions would be pointless to the original mix.
You might as well turn up the volume of single tracks 5-fold and try to identify mix issues....which again would be pointless, as it would not be relative to the original mix.

But hey...if you think it can help you...go for it.
I mean...even lava lamps have an effect on mixes.

 

[mjbphotos]

The thing is - how do you know you are not shifting some of the sound into another nodal-problem range? Or from a non-problem frequency to a problem one?

 

[miroslav]

The thing is - how do you know you are not shifting some of the sound into another nodal-problem range? Or from a non-problem frequency to a problem one?

Exactly.

Which is why anything "learned" from that type of pitch-shifted exercise has little to do with the original.