bvideo- I never imagined that a knob on a tape recorder could make a stringed instrument that hasn't been tuned since last Monday or Philadelphia sound like it is in tune.

yorolpal

Nah, ol pal.  Sorry, I wasn't referring to you except with the "everyone should just play in tune" thingy.  Just in general to many points raised in this ol thread.  As you say...we mostly agree...as per usual:-)  Mike, I think, half facetiously asked me to be clear so I was trying to do that.  Who knows if I succeeded??  Sorry you felt singled out.  And besides...who listen's to my dimbulbed ramblins, anyways? :-)

SteveStrummerUK


Does X2 have a jazz guitar patch for Dim Pro?


I'm reliably informed that they're a bugger to tune to concert pitch though....

bapu

SteveStrummerUK


Does X2 have a jazz guitar patch for Dim Pro?


I'm reliably informed that they're a bugger to tune to concert pitch though....

There is no Jazz without DimPro, roight?


I heard many instruments are out of tune in DimPro.

mike_mccue


It's long been my impression that members of traditional Jazz ensembles routinely denigrate the few guitarists they allow on stage because a guitar with a traditional fretboard tends to sound sour when arranged with the piano.

All the other instruments get along fine... and then there's the guitarist.

Hint, this has nothing to do with Varispeed but rather is meant to further the idea that even with familiar and popular instruments, anything you can do to make all the instruments sound sweeter is helpful.


best regards,
mike

subtlearts


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. 

trimph1


OK....now here is an interesting scenario for your perusal.

Suppose you are recording a Gamelan orchestra mixed in with a bunch of western instruments. Which way would you tune it to? And how?