SteveStrummerUK

bapu

Jonbouy

I have had outstanding success with an elastic band bass.  

It's an Alembic, I keep telling you.

 
Pfft.........
 
I have a Varilembic.
 
It is tuned to the same pitch as a concert dulcimer.
 
I can play it at any speed, so my DAW doesn't have to.
 
 

bapu

SteveStrummerUK

bapu

Jonbouy

I have had outstanding success with an elastic band bass.  

It's an Alembic, I keep telling you.

Pfft.........

I have a Varilembic.

It is tuned to the same pitch as a concert dulcimer.

I can play it at any speed, so my DAW doesn't have to.

 
Woot woot!
 
A good ol' fashioned hoedown.
 
Pass the Mountain Dew bay-beeeeeeee

*

Well Mike did you work out this problem without needing a workaround?
 
You've been given plenty of solutions, any of them work for you or were you just ranting for the sake of it?

mmmm...if my dulcimer was out of tune with the rest of the arrangement I'd just leave it alone.

Dissonance has its uses.....

trimph1


Bapu has its uses.....

Or does he?

Well, as usual it's all gotten rediculous. Varispeed on tape wasn't what it needed to be. Retuning shouldn't be an aspect of slowing down a set of sonic waves in context to pitch. What it says is, you are dragging across a physical media with only so many deminsions in the code impressed upon it. Ever use the Scrub tool? It's an example of Varispeed and the effects of that variance on digital units. Everyone is talking about variances in the range of semitones-octaves-tempos. But what is perception resolution of the DAW? 24 bit? 1056 bit? In order to slow down and maintain event pitch and tuning, you would have to rewrite the digital instructions on a sound imprint-recording to include increments that weren't there in the original. Because, the tempo and timing and duration of every digital message-event recorded in a track-sound impression has a place in the time and code of the digital recording. So how do you tell a huge list of digital instructions to happen at a different rate? It's over my head.

I SURE agree with you guys that Vari-PITCH- (you had to do it with tape SPEED in the old days) is an essential tool for recording/overdubbing real instruments in the studio. I mostly record clients and groups- in the studio- by the hour, for money... there is nothing easier and faster than just one-slider tuning the song to any instrument that walks through the door! 

More especially, the instruments that you just can't easily tune- like Hammond organs, REAL grand pianos, Fender Rhodes, nasty old Clavi's, pipe organs, pump organs, harps, accordions, harmonicas, zithers, melodicas, harpsichords, tubular bells, ethnic drums, 12-strings, sitars, xylophones, native american wood flutes, bagpipes, autoharps, bowed psaltries, pan flutes, Farfisas, dumb little toy keyboards... dang- it's a long list of coolness! Synthetic emulations of these instruments are great- but there's absolutely no comparison to the real thing for cool. 

It's SOOO much easier to be a creative and excellent Recording Studio if you can just one-slider-tune the song to a fun, unusual overdub! I collect odd acoustic instruments from all over the world, and part of the cool vibe of my studio is that there's hundreds of strange and interesting noise toys hanging all over the walls. People love trying the strange thangs... 

Sure miss Vari-Pitch.

Hey Mike, Have you looked for a simple pitch-shifting plugin that could be placed on the mix output (or whatever monitor channels you would have going out to the musician)? Assume you want something where you are only doing minor adjustments (possibly 50 cents or less) to the pitch so don't need to preserve formants or enharmonic timbre exactly. I guess this would be solution "A.1)" but seems fairly trivial to setup. You would simultaneously track (or process post recording) with the same plugin on your input of the non-standard instrument but with a complementary pitch adjustment. That said, this should be easy enough that it would be a cool feature to Sonar X2. Regards, Ryan

So....  Is it only pitch that Mike was after?   True tape varispeed would also affect tempo, but maybe that doesn't matter much in Mike's example (only slight tuning variations).   For cases where the pitch is a few semi-tones lower, I wonder if the tempo reduction would also affect the feel...   
 
For parts that are difficult to play a full tempo, true tape varispeed wouldn't work so well since the pitch is also affected. 
 
All this makes me wonder if three pages worth of posts are actually requesting three unique variations after all.