• SONAR
  • A Personal Problem
2018/07/28 10:33:25
Johnbee58
No, it's not drugs or alcohol.  It's a music thing.
Every project I've ever created I feel as if I have to open it in Audacity and crank the speed up 2.5 %.  Please don't ask why I feel as if I just have to do this.  I honestly don't know, but it's become sort of an obsession.  No matter what tempo I set the project at to create it, I just can't resist the urge to tweak the speed exactly that much.  And I'm wondering if that may be contributing to why I feel as if the overall sound quality of my stuff sucks.  Wouldn't doing something like that have a negative effect on the frequencies of a sound file?  Maybe the "sound police" will bust me someday for abuse of music.
 
John B.
 
I can see it someday.  "I charge you with criminal abuse of a musical creation device!"
2018/07/28 11:30:30
tnipe
How about when you create a project and find your tempo, increase the bpm with 2,5% then and there? I would think doing that in Audacity after the song is finished is detrimental to the audio. Well, people have had worse problems 😀
2018/07/28 11:58:32
bitflipper
That's an odd affliction, John. At least, it's the first time I've heard of it.
 
Although, come to think of it, I have a perhaps related condition. For me, it's a tendency to play too fast. Perhaps channeling the late Keith Emerson (I wish!). Then I have to force myself to slow down when it comes time to record.
 
The way I combat that propensity is to start every recording with a click track, over which I record a disposable guide track. Then I copy my little test tune over to my pocket player, wait a day, and then listen to it away from the studio. If it feels rushed, it's easy to slow it down (being a purely MIDI concoction at that point) and listen again. I don't know why guitarists and keyboardists think click tracks are just for drummers.
 
However, I would never adjust the tempo of an audio recording. If you suspect that stretching and compressing time negatively affects audio quality, you'd be right. 2.5% is probably safe, but I still wouldn't do it.
 
2018/07/28 12:04:05
Johnbee58
It's just weird.  I can't stand when the beat of a song drags, so that's why I feel obsessed to boost it.  But the funny thing is sometimes later on when I'm listening to a song that I've boosted (maybe several weeks or months later) it'll sound like it's dragging anyway.  Are there any musical psychologists out there?
 
JB
2018/07/28 12:23:02
kevro2000
I'm a modern square dance caller, and I've worked on a few songs for the genre, lately. Square dance music pretty much has to be between 126-130bpm, otherwise dancers cannot work as a group of 8 in a square. One thing I do not have a problem with, is CbB's timing.Once I set a tempo for a song, its consistent. Thankfully.
2018/07/28 12:40:45
The Maillard Reaction
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2018/07/28 13:02:55
fireberd
Years (many years) ago it was common to slightly speed up recordings as "it made them sound better".  I knew a lot of old Country recordings were not in standard tuning but didn't think about them being sped up as the reason they were not in standard, as that was the "before electronic tuners" era.  The first recording session that I did, in 1960 (at Carpenter's Music in Biloxi Ms), the engineer slightly sped up when he cut us a 78 of the session. 
 
The recording studio owner I worked with in he mid/late 70's in Kansas City told me about the speeding up, that he learned about working as an apprentice in a Nashville recording studio.  
2018/07/28 13:31:41
Johnbee58
I don't really raise it to change the pitch (although that does happen by default) but more the speed. I want to hear it faster.
2018/07/28 16:57:49
Bristol_Jonesey
Interesting.
 
I revisited one of my of projects and decided to re-record certain bits of it and ended up slowing it down from about 135 bpm to 120.
 
I much prefer the slowed down version
2018/07/28 16:58:45
fireberd
Best option is to do the recording faster than you think it should be.  Then the final product will be "faster" and no need to speed it up.
 
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