Pitch shifting

C

carus1

New member
hi,

I have encountered a slight(I hope) problem in some acoustic recordings I have been doing. I have tracked acoustic guitar, and vocals and a whole bunch of harmonies, done to a click track for 7 tunes.

The problem is, I was a bit of a goose and the guitar whilst being in tune with itself is probably about a quarter of a tone flat from standard tuning. ie. the low e string is somewhere between eflat and e. All the vocal tracks have been done to these slightly flat guitar tracks. Damn new strings!

Now this in itself normally wouldnt bother me, as long as the guitars in tune with itself, but I'd like to add some other instrumentation, namely keyboards.

I was hoping for some advice as to what I should do. This presents a problem because obviously the tuning of keyboards is very precise.

questions goin through my head are;

1) Could I shift the pitch of the entire performance without affecting the tempo? if I did this, would the vocal still sound natural or would I get a chipmunk effect? Furthermore, would I get a better result by running the entire mix through a pitch shifter or should the vocals and guitar be run through seperately.

2) Would I get a better result by somehow shifting the pitch of the keyboards? We would be using a nord electro. If i did shift the pitch of the keyboards, when recording how could I make the performer comfortable to play in a situation where what he's playing to is out of tune?

3) Should I bin the lot and start from scratch?(I'd be very dissappointed if i had to do this because the acoustic and vox were done using great gear and i paid for the studio time)


I realise thats a lot of questions but any advice would be much appreciated, I am a bit of an amateur with all this.
My main concern is that i want the recordings to sound natural.

Thanks for any advice,

Carl
 
you could try pitchshifting the whole track, so that the keyboardist is playing to the same pitch.

then shift the recording of the keyboard down so that it is in line with your original acoustic and singing (and ditch the pitchshifted original track).


you probably wouldn't get any timing issues if you were to use a good pitchshifter. unless you have a great plug-in, then the voice (especially with harmonies) may sound unnatural being pitch-shifted, whereas doing the keyboard might produce quite a nice sound.
 
If it's electronic keyboards, it should be easy to de-tune appropriately. Not so easy of course if we're talking acoustic piano, rhodes, etc., in which case I'd go with what zoiks said. Lot's of major release songs were recorded out of standard tuning, so I would rather keep it that way than put it through a pitch shifting algorthm. It's easy to do in the DAW software I use (Samplitude), but it's not entirely without artifacts.
 
I would STRONGLY advise not shifting the entire song back to standard tuning. It would be better to alter the keyboard. If is is an electric piano, this should be simple. Alot of them have a simple + - 12% or so pitch wheel usually on the back. I think this should help.

The reason I say not to alter what you've already done is because you are altering the sound file's structure, thus making it less true to the original sound. It's like having some bits of sound accurate, and every other one some artificial additive....hard to explain, but I think you get it.
 
Thanks for all the advice everyone. I guess I'll have a look at the nord electro and see if its possible to detune it slightly. if not I think I'll go with what zoiks said. cheers
 
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