Having been a DJ from 80 thru 83, I can tell you that the same song has probably been played at all sorts of different pitches over the vinyl years since we used to fiddle with the turn table speeds a lot for a variety of reasons: An actual mix (speed one song up or another down a bit), to fit a song in before a required break, to make the transition between two dissimilar songs less, or just because someone forgot to reset the speed to exactly 45rpm or 33rpm depending.
 
I realized this pain whenever I was trying to learn songs off the radio by ear too...

Although it was not really my bag at the time (as a white guy thrasho metalhead) I have always marveled at the old school turntable pioneer kids. Like Sugarhill Gang and whatnot.
 
At first glance to an outside observer it was easy to dismiss as "Oh, that guy's just playing records of other people's stuff. Lame!" but for me, as I was learning music myself, I started realizing how crazy that actually was and still don't fully get it.
 
I mean you usually would only have TWO turntables ("and a microphone" fwah fwah) so you can only have two stereo samples going MAYBE over top of a drum machine (if you were lucky). Being able to tempo match/pitch match/drop the needle EXACTLY where it needed to be/add flourishes like drag and scratching/etc with just that old analog gear...
 
that is PSYCHO shiz.
 
Of course I guess once vinyl pressing companies caught on and started making custom discs for that type of DJing and of course now in the digital age where it can all be prepped before hand at home and triggered with a poke at a button it's... well still occasionally impressive in some cases but those OG spinners man...
 
Just seems like a lot more talent and effort than those cats were given credit for and I kind of want to learn exactly how it all worked... someday... once I figure out how to work the crap I'm already wrestling with. lulz
 
/blather

Oh and when I'm trying to learn covers and find the tuning of whatever copy I have on hand isn't in a "proper" tuning (or if I have been ask to transpose it to another key) all these fancy digimitalizing tools are awesome. In SONAR I've just been using the DSP "Process > Transpose" on the raw stereo files and bingo bango... I got my new key/tuning.
 
For timing I just split and stretch the bastard measure by measure to force it onto the grid/tempo map.
 
Cripes... we've come so far. I got into this stuff at EXACTLY the right time methinks (even though it means I'm a bit of derp as far as background history/techniques but I'm catching up).
 
/okay serious...
//blather... right...
///NOW
 

By the way, I was a DJ from 1980 thru 1983 (before everyone though they were a DJ).  If the manager caught any of us doing the crap they did to records in clubs, we were fired.  You have one song playing on one turntable, then you monitor the next song on the second turntable, find a good beat then (with your finger on the record) carefully move the record forwards and backwards over that beat until you get the timing right.  Then you let it spin and, at the right time, slowly fade one out as you fade the other one in.  Whenever you had a significant change in beat, you did those whenever you had to speak so no one really noticed the change.
 
Sure, you could do some sample teases of what was coming up, but any scratching or extreme sampling was a sure way out the door.

Just curious, what are some of the common soft synths that easily support retuning (i.e. A432)?

Mesh
Just curious, what are some of the common soft synths that easily support retuning (i.e. A432)?

Pretty sure Dim Pro has fine tuning.

Beepster

Mesh
Just curious, what are some of the common soft synths that easily support retuning (i.e. A432)?

Pretty sure Dim Pro has fine tuning.

Cool beans...thanks Beeps.
I haven't used Dim Pro in years......might be a good time to mess around with it.

I think it is set in the sample area (and maybe has to be done for each "dimension" sample in the patch?).
 
I watched the videos for all the Cake synths/instruments (the SWA Karl Rose one) a while back but have mostly been guiting it up since. I may be thinking of Rapture or Zeta... but I think those might have fine tuning as well (seems like Zeta definitely would).
 
So basically... I don't know what the fruck I'm talking about aside from that at least one of the included higher end synths has fine tuning and likely more.
 
Haven't checked out Rapture Session yet so that might be worth looking at as well.

Wasn't there a thread a while back about setting up a Cake synth to be able to produce Indian style quarter tone scales? I only skimmed it but if anyone remembers that or has it bookmarked that seemed like it had a lot of good info for this type of thing. And I think I'm remembering a lot of folks bringing up Dim Pro for this type of stuff.

I think Yoko Ono uses the Scared Sounds Scale (after rereading the actual thread title).