Pitch shift your mix down by -3 to -5 sents. What happens to the mix?

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Shifting the pitch I'm sure alters the wave, and possibly introduces artifacts that your ear is hearing as an "improvement". 

What would be an interesting test to do would be to export the un-changed mix..... and the detuned mix and post them both in the songs forum. Put them in the same thread and indicate what you did and have other people listen and comment. See if the other ears agree. 

I do know that simply changing the key on a song even as little as a half step does add a new dimension to the song...... so it is totally possible that pitch shifting does likewise.

Pitch shift your stereo mix/master down by -3 to -5 sents. When I do this to any of my tracks I immediately get more punch and a lovely colour and even more life in the track. Maybe even better separation and stereo image. Now lets be clear here. There is too many bad artefacts to warrant such a process but what the heck is going on here that can result in such a pleasant result?

 
When working with early day samplers (hardware instruments), many folks liked the sound of pitch-shifting samples down.
It added "pleasant sounding" artifacts...
Witness the Emax... and folks like Trent Reznor.  The Emax was certainly not "clean"... but pleasantly grungy.

so whats going on technically here?   whats the mystery?

@rick:    yes this is interesting.  i was thinking it may have something to do with " formanants  " in the pitching plugin.  though it does sound a little like chorusing/detuning now that you mention it.  its hard to pin down.

i'm wondering how I could achieve such results without the pitch shift.  It almost brings my mixes up to the big dogs but I have to exclude the pitching itself.   Though I have tried chorus fx before but its not the same result.

Just to be clear, it's "cents". 100 cents is a semi-tone. It's hard for most people to hear a difference of less than 6 cents. Of course, professional musicians and trained sound folks and engineers can sometimes hear such fine distinctions. The algorithm you use for pitch shifting makes a large difference in the sound.

OK,but WHAT are you using "moffdnb" to lower your stereo master,or what ever by 3 to 5 cents?

Surely it's NOT the 32bit CW "pitch shifter"?

I'm intrigued,as I use Eb tuning[-1 semitone] on all but 1 of my guitars,and have done so for a long time.

I still have an oldish DVD player,that has a "key" button on the remote,that lowers or raises the pitch-Without changing the timing,and I used it a lot,when learning cover tunes,to change the source to "my" tuning.

Iv'e never since seen another stand alone DVD player,with this feature,but it sure came in handy,and yes some songs did sound better/different at the different pitches,I'm a little un-aware as to doing exactly the same thing in X1 though,so.....

Bob.

Man, that changes the argument completely. So you are talking about pitch shifting your entire mix down by 3 to 5 SEMITONES, not cents? That is a huge difference. It just means your song is now in another key. Quite a different thing to the idea of changing it by 3 to 5 cents, where you might introduce some harmonic and phase effects. Is that right?

How about looking at it from a mix integrity or hi fi point of view. Shifting a whole mix down by even 1 or 2 semitones surely must do a fair bit of damage to the mix. What you might be liking about it is simply the fact that the key has dropped and the bottom end is going to change (increase) as a result.

How would that compare to redoing all the music in the lower key to start with and re recording everything. Maybe you did not spend enough time finding the corrcet key for the music. I bet a complete re record and mix in the lower key will sound sonically better than what you are trying to do.

Maybe your mixes are not good enough to begin with and you are looking for a way out or a simple solution to fix it by doing something like pitch shifting to compensate. If the composition is good and the performance is good and the mix is good I have found there should be never a need to alter an entire mix in this or any manner.

I have said before whenever you put your entire mix through a process or effect one should think very carefully and consider what you are doing to that mix. It might appear to sound good at first but I bet on further and careful listening you will find many other aspects of it are being destroyed in the process.

Varispeeding an analog multitrack down is quite different to pitch shifting an entire digital mix down. It is a much smoother and more pleasant sound. But at the same time experimenting can be fun, it is just that I would not be inclined to do something like that to entire mix after I had gone to a lot of trouble to make it sound good in the first place.

Reaper has the best digital Varispeed, there are no artifacts when it is used properly. Once again, I am not promoting this product until Cake give us a Varispeed that operates the same as Reaper, I will stop saying use Reaper for Varispeed, I still do all my mixing in Sonar.

Perspective is the artists trick and even then I will mix something and go back for or 5 years later and do another mix, this is also an artists perogative.

Listen to some of the best albums of all time Steven and you will hear all sorts of slow downs and speed us, in terms of tape.

The most famous being Strawberry Fields, they slowed the first section down and sped the second senction up so that two different version's of Stawberry Fields could be joined as one.

Don't say no to one of the greatest production techniques of all time.

And you can get some wonderful effects from just slowing down a track without pitch shift using the Audio Snap Pallate (there you go Cake).

Neb