Hey Steve C-
I was thinking of how to describe the essential usefulness- of what you were saying seemed not-so-useful- when I realized you had a good point! Actually, I never thought of it before- but wouldn't it be great if you had an easy way to adjust TEMPO- independent of Pitch- easily? 

Just wanted to slow down- or speed up- your song or a section of your song? You can, WITH MIDI ONLY- easy. But not WITH all the rest of your audio tracks! Great point! You probably won't even care! 

Great point, I think! But also being able to tune your song to an overdub (real) instrument with one slider is truly an essential part of running a commercial studio, I think. 

Living Room Rocker had the nice idea that maybe Sonar R-mix had some of these possibilities as the full VST does. Looking at the Cakewalk Blog "sneak peek" it appears the vari speed sliders are absent.

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hey yorolpal! 
Isn't it WAY easier to one-slider-tune the song to the grand piano than to physically tune ALL those dang strings to a song? Same with the other instruments- every tine on a Rhodes,  all the reeds on an accordion- etc. That's the suggestion. 

Sometimes it's just a few cents. But freedom... that's a buck .05

stevec


I never realized it was that common for so many instruments to not be tuned to 440.   Particularly pianos, accordians, organs, and 12 string guitars (really?).   I guess these common instruments can never be played live in an ensemble.
 
But things like pipe organs, percussion and simple wind instruments - yeah, having no "tunability" makes it difficult to do anything if they weren't tuned to 440 during manufacturing.   Which honestly does seem like an odd choice in the 21st century, though for older instruments...
 

Twelve-string guitars are often tuned down one semi-tone. Twelve strings put alot of tension on the neck so many players opt for tuning lower to avoid warping. This can also be tied in to string thickness - I use extremely heavy strings on most of my guitars, other players find it brutal. I call it tone. It's often easier for an engineer to accomodate a 12-string if they can Varispeed. And I know that many will want to chime in with all the possible "fixes" but there are many reasons the Varispeed is easier. When a customer is footing the bill it's in your best interests to satisfy them as quickly and painlessly as possible. Also it's not necessarily the best thing to try and convince an "artiste" that they should capo or tune alternately. Sometimes the easiet solution is Varispeed.
 
If you record a piano on location, or even one that has been rolled between studios (Studio A to Studio C) a few times then you often do not have the time nor the luxury of tuning the piano before a session. Welcome to life in the professional fast lane.
 
Most engineers and studios are always on the clock. The client is paying. Should they pay $xxx an hour while you call in a piano tuner at 3:00 AM? Not when you can use Varispeed. Ditto for many of the above listed instruments. Time is money. Tuning can be a fairly time consuming issue with some instruments.
 
So you tell the band to make sure the "insert ethnic instrument here" is tuned when they show up. It isn't. How do you deal with the issue? Lecture them and force them to tune while you lose a client? Or accomodate them and make them smile.
 
Sometimes a band will want to record bed tracks simulataneously. You may tell them a thousand times to tune up, and to use electronic (or better yet, strobe) tuners, but when you sit down to record that isn't always the case. Sometimes they have tuned "together" but it's not perfecftly on pitch at A440. So you end up with a great take only to realize, after the fact, that they are tuned slightly off. Now when you roll in the perfectly tuned piano you have a problem. Varispeed can be the easiest solution.
 
Some people deliberately like their instruments tuned slightly off of A440 for timbre preferance. And some do it for quasi-spiritual reasons:
http://www.528records.com/
Either way, if you want to incorporate a "fixed pitch" instrument into this mix, like the piano that was in fact just tuned, then Varispeed makes the job quicker and easier.
 
Simple wind instruments, old analog synths...both are among many 21st century instruments that may well have been in "perfect" tuning when manufactured but have "drifted" over time. Acoustic and analog instruments are prone to change over time, that unique quality is part of what makes them special. Wood dries and expands. Oscillators drift. So you deal with it.
 
The vocalist shows up for the third straight day of tracking. The band purchased a block of ten days and this is this last day, no exceptions. Eighty percent of the vocals are recorded but today, as the vocalist is starting to lose it after two heavy days of recording, the only way they are gonna pull off all the vocals is to finish the parts singing one half step lower.
 
Those are a few examples. And please, let's not repeat all the workarounds again.
 
The fact here is that often if some members of the forum don't see immediate personal use then the request is questioned, scrutinized, ridiculed, opposed...it shouldn't always be the responsibility of a poster making a request to have to justify the requests with long-winded explanations that are often not read in their entirety nor interpreted correctly. Trying to justify a request to someone who doesn't need it or doesn't understand it is one of the bigger hastles on this forum.

backwoods


SToons- the forum is not the place for fetaure requests. The Cakewalk guys have made that clear- repeatedly. 

But it can be a place for discussion. If you feel threatened "justifying" a request, why not make it through the official channel:

http://www.cakewalk.com/support/contact/featurerequest.aspx

I did not make the request. I did not start the thread.
 
The thread is titled "Why/How/When SONAR X users can benefit from Varispeed". It is not a formal request although a request of sorts was previously made by the OP in a different thread. This thread is obviously an attempt to "justify" the request. If you have an issue with that you might have chimed in several days and a hundred posts back. And addressed it appropriately.
 
There is a big difference between "feeling threatened" and feeling like you're trying to justify something to those that seem to either ignore or misinterpet well reasoned posts. Try not to mistake the two.
 
If you want to chastize the OP for posting in the wrong forum by all means do so, but as you chose to phrase it

If you feel threatened "justifying" a request, why not make it through the official channel

let me ask - are you suggesting those that respond to requests in the Feature Request forum are less threatening and more likely to read posts more carefully and respond accordingly? Are people there more likely to take the time to understand what's written in that forum? Why would someone feel "threatened" simply because they posted in the wrong forum? Lost me there.
 
People discuss requests here often before a "feature request" is sent. "Who would like to see XY feature in Sonar X2.1?". That doesn't give posters licence to show a lack of respect when responding.
 
I also find it rather odd that you would interpret

The fact here is that often if some members of the forum don't see immediate personal use then the request is questioned, scrutinized, ridiculed, opposed...it shouldn't always be the responsibility of a poster making a request to have to justify the requests with long-winded explanations that are often not read in their entirety nor interpreted correctly. Trying to justify a request to someone who doesn't need it or doesn't understand it is one of the bigger hastles on this forum.

as someone feeling "threatened". Since most people interpret things based on how they themselves would react one can only say "Hmmm...".

backwoods


Gee, why are you questioning my suggestion so vigorously..... something not quite right here....

Hunh, a suggestion that included things like "threatened" in a clearly derogatory and inflammatory manner and suggested that this thread was somehow inappropriate when clearly it is not. No, not at all provocative. Again. Not like I have experienced this before with you...
I think it quite reasonable to assume why your original post was directed at me, not towards the appropriate party.
 
If I pull up the last 50 feature requests made in this forum, in how many would I find someone named backwoods has posted

the forum is not the place for fetaure requests. The Cakewalk guys have made that clear- repeatedly.
 
 

Should I be flattered that you inappropriately addressed me? 

 

backwoods


You're almost frothing at the mouth there SToons.

Hardly. It's called ROBUST DISCUSSION
 
Odd that most posts I make you respond to with assumptions like my feeling threatened, frothing at the mouth or being agitated. You seem to relate everything to a self-prescribed emotion. Again, quite inappropriate and inflammatory. Not hard to see a pattern here.

 
I have nothing against Varispeed but also have nothing against ROBUST DISCUSSION- which is what this forum is for.  

p.s. I have made feature suggestions myself and have even had one taken up 


"I think it quite reasonable to assume why your original post was directed at me, not towards the appropriate party. "  


my original post concerned living Room Rocker's suggestion about the possibility of RMix containing varispeed.  
 
 

Clearly I was referring to the post in which you originally addressed me. See post #101.

 
I directed you to the feature request link because you seemed agitated that people on this forum challenged feature suggestions.
 
 

You're mistaken, I see nothing wrong with challenging a feature request. How is not reading a post thoroughly and then responding to it inaccurately "challenging" a feature request?. It's just plain inappropriate and disrespectful.

My comments were:
"The fact here is that often if some members of the forum don't see immediate personal use then the request is questioned, scrutinized, ridiculed, opposed...it shouldn't always be the responsibility of a poster making a request to have to justify the requests with long-winded explanations that are often not read in their entirety nor interpreted correctly. Trying to justify a request to someone who doesn't need it or doesn't understand it is one of the bigger hastles on this forum. "

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Mike, I know there are options.  I actually use them already, not for transposing though.
 
Use zPlane and you can stay in Sonar, its less of a pain than loading up another app, which is something you made clear already you didn't want to do. In fact zPlane are behind much of the recent licensing that's made 'Varispeed' viable in some DAWs in recent years. 
 
And why are you portraying yourself as a Monkey lately?  Monkey's are cute.

..

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As a non-professional I'm curious, how was/is the varispeed knob set to tune to the non-standard instrument? Do you record a separate track with some long notes strummed or played on piano (etc.) then adjust the knob while said musician is playing the same chord until they sound in consonance? Do the other DAWs provide any tools to make this easier, like an auto-varispeed feature (analogous to autotune)? I.e. go through the same procedure above while monitoring input and allow DAW to set the varispeed knob?

Hi all. A few thoughts:

1. I personally absolutely support the proposition (a few versions old now at least) of including traditional varispeed functionality in Sonar, i.e. sample-rate-based, which modifies pitch and time simultaneously, as it is implemented in Reaper. I probably wouldn't use it much myself but I can absolutely see the usefulness of it, if only because it's a long-standing studio technique which can be and has been used to great creative effect (Les Paul anyone?). 

2. Yes, there are workarounds to get generally the same effect; no, none of them are exactly the same thing, and none of them are as simple or elegant as just including the feature. So why the resistance?


3. I guess that from the perspective of people that don't have any use for the feature, they don't want CW to 'waste' dev resources on something that they won't use (the same argument usually used to beat down the Staff View enthusiasts who hope without hope every year that something will have improved in that area); but from the perspective of those who would really like the feature, not a workaround, it's hard to see why people are so upset at the proposition. 


4. I would also be happy to see some kind of robust implementation of pitch-and-time-independent variability, along the lines of what is now implemented in Reason (as of the inclusion of the Record functionality in v6). This is not the same thing, however. 

5. I am both a piano player and a piano tuner; suffice to say that tuning a piano is not something for the uninitiated to attempt with (or without) a strobe tuner. A Rhodes, OK, but a piano is a horse of a different feather. Due to the double/triple strings, the interaction of said strings stretched under high tension over a bridge mounted on a thin wooden soundboard, and the pins-in-wood tuning mechanism, not to mention the inharmonicity of individual strings and the innate tension between high harmonics of low strings and the fundamentals of high strings, usually solved by a degree of 'stretching'... suffice to say it's a non-trivial endeavour. 

6. Don't even get me started about accordions. 

7. A-440 is nowhere near as universal a standard as people seem to think, certainly not here in Europe in any case; modern orchestras regularly (almost universally) tune considerably higher, whereas 'period' instruments in, say, Baroque orchestras are often much lower, the instruments having been built with (then-standard) lower tunings in mind. In some cases they literally cannot be made to play in tune at modern pitch. When I tune an older piano I am often faced with a dilemma - try to get it up to a modern pitch (or higher - 442 is sometimes requested over here) where it will probably not stay in tune very well, or leave it where it is and put it in tune with itself. It depends on how the instrument will be used. 

8. I say all this to illustrate that the 'everybody should just play in tune and everything will be OK' line of reasoning is not very realistic, since 'in tune' is really a relative concept - our entire system of tuning, equal-temperament, is actually just a kind of compromise to get around physical/mathematical tuning problems that are built in to the universe, and if you took a modern piano tuned to equal-temperament at A-440 back in time and played it for people 400 years ago they would find it horribly out of tune. Even today, orchestral instruments capable of just-intonation tune their intervals more dynamically while playing, because, well, it sounds better. When I was at university I played French Horn as a second instrument (I was in the jazz piano program), and played in a couple of classical ensembles where learning to bend notes up or down based on whether we were playing the 5th or the 3d of a given chord was a big part of making the ensemble sound more in tune. It's not as simple as sticking a tuner on the instrument and getting the needle to line up. Tuning is subtle, difficult, complicated stuff. 

9. 'Varispeed' in any manifestation will obviously not solve all of these problems, but it's a handy tool to have in the arsenal for an engineer to solve a problem quickly, and/or it can be used really creatively, so maybe we can keep the idea separate from how anyone feels about Mike or how he presents his ideas or suggestions? If we were able to maintain that as a guiding principle - try to focus on the idea at hand, not whatever personal baggage might be floating around, it might help things stay more constructive and less combative around here... just a thought. I don't know, I've been away for a while, and I know it's easy to get caught up in these things, but that's my observation about the general tone.