In some records vocal and/or instrumental loops are pitched up.
You often hear this in disco house tracks where an entire loop that has a bassline, drums, strings and somethimes vocals are pitched.
It sounds a bit similiar to a record that is pitched up on a turntable to ahigh a degree, I hope you guys understand what I mean.
Someone told me this is easily done in Ableton by transposing.
Im trying to do the same thing in Cubase 6.5 but cant get this done correctly.
If for example I sample a disco loop of 110 BPM and I use the pitch tool it does not sound the same as a pitched turntable. Certain notes sound a bit “false” and it kind of destroys the sound a bit.
The same goes for warping with the elastik pro tape or pitch setting.
I hope you guys can help out and explain how this is done.
Also, which “pitch tool” are you using? If you process the audio (rather than using an insert pitch plugin) it sounds way better. Select your audio part, then from the Audio menu, select Process->Pitch Shift.
I too have found that using the pitch tool quickly degrades the quality of a sample. My solution has been to load the sample into Cubase’s Groove Agent. From there you can adjust the pitch, but adjusting the pitch speeds up/slows down the sample. If I wanted to maintain the original BPM or otherwise adjust the BPM, I would resample my modified sound from the output of Groove Agent into a new audio clip and warp that clip to fit my BPM. (It seems that warping a clip causes less degradation than pitching it). I might even resample again after warping, just so I don’t accidentally screw it up after I’ve got it the way I want it or if I want to do further processing on it (like slicing).
It’s kind of a roundabout solution, and there might be a better way to do this. Halion can do this much more efficiently, though. (Other samplers can too, but Halion allows you to drag/drop clips directly from Cubase.) I downloaded the 30-day trial of Halion for a project where I was doing a lot of this sort of thing, and it saved me a lot of headache.
offline by audio > process > pitch shift, not retaining length for sampler-style ‘pitching by resampling’.
on-the-fly by realtime-transposing via the infoline.
on-the-fly sampler-style by switching the event to elastique-tape (does c6 have that already?). then use the resize applies timestretch tool. you have to make sure by yourself that you’re landing on a correct pitch though as this won’t snap in musical increments. bit of a bummer, this, i hope they implement a feature to enable this.
I already tried the offilne method (process - pitch shift) many times but it seems to kind off “destroys” the sound quickly and if i am using a loop with many instruments it sounds out of tune somehow.
I believe with the pitch shift tool you have to set up a root key first but I dont know what that is when using a full loop.
Cubase 6.5 does have Elestique-Tape (in 3 flavours), basically I face the same issue as with the pitch shift tool, it sounds false/out of tune quickly,
For me both methods seem different then the kind of pitch you get on a turntable, that speeds and pitches it up but parts of the sound does not get out of tune with the rest of material in the loop.
Doing this with a sampler is something I would have to try. I will see if I can get a Halion demo and try that out.