12-string on shoestring (pitch shifting)

  • Thread starter Thread starter guttadaj
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guttadaj

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I have dreams of owning a 12-string guitar someday, but on my current shoestring budget, that day seems quite far away. So, in the meantime, I figured, "Hey! I'll just record my guitar part and pitch shift it up an octave and... voila... a poor man's 12-string." :D So, I selected my guitar track, chose Apply Audio Effects - Cakewalk - Pitch Shifter. I set the Pitch Shift to 12, the Dry and Wet Mixes both to 100% for starters, and all the other values to 0. I chose to "Process in Place, Mono result" and went for it. Expecting to bask in the ethereal, siren song of my new makeshift 12-string, I played the new track.
What the ....?? :confused:

It sounds like ass! There's a whole bunch of flutter (almost like a rotary effect) on the pitch-shifted signal. Anyone have any luck doing something like this? Is this a bit-depth issue? (My soundcard does not support 24 bit depth if that's required, but it doesn't say so anywhere I could find.)

Also, I tried Transpose, entering 12 for the amount and checking Transpose Audio (only have this 1 track at the moment - just experimenting). Nothing at all happened. :rolleyes:

Any insight much appreciated. Thanks!
-Jeff
 
HS2002 user

forgot to mention that - curious to see if other HS users have problems with this too but it works fine in SONAR... what a surprise that would be, huh? :rolleyes:
 
What are you playing on your guitar? Chords or seperate notes? Because there's NO pitchshifter around that can process multiple notes at the same time (like chords) in a convincing way.

I think running SONAR's pitch shifter on your guitarpart will produce the exact same (bad) result.
 
Yeah, I'm playing chords. So the pitch shifter is only good for things like solos, vocal lines, etc., huh? Good to know, but sort-of a bummer... So much for my makeshift 12-string. I guess I've found me a pitch-shifter/rotary-sounding effect, though. :D
Thanks for the info, Pedullist! :)
 
guttadaj said:
So the pitch shifter is only good for things like solos, vocal lines, etc., huh?
Click to expand...
And it's not even too great for those things either.

Even Autotune, which is a $300+ program by itself, does not do too great a job if the shift/change is too large. Autotune works fairly well for correcting small deviations (less than one full note), but after that it gets pretty iffy.

Most tools for changing pitch that I have encountered leave a lot of artifacts.
 
So, sounds like I should not expect a killer octave effect out of this. Darn... Anyone know of any good DXi octave effects out there, or would I pretty much need to get a hardware effects unit for this to get a decent result?
 
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