NON-Formant vocals pitch change

Hi!

I have used Cubase a lot but this PICTH Algorithm stuff is still unclear to me. Should be studying a bit…:slight_smile:

But anyway;; I would like to alter my vocal event’s pitch so that the “tempo” retains as constant but the picth would be ie. altered, say, to 8 semitones higher - BUT I would like this time to do it so that Cubase would NOT try to make the picth altering sound “natural”. I mean I want to make pitch higher so that it would sound like listening vocals from the tape while making a tape roll/run faster so that the pitch of course gets higher but also the vocals’ sound gets like… how do you say it… “nasal”.

I know that the “tape way” the ‘speed’ or tempo also becomes quicker but I don’t now want that - I ONLY want the vocals’ sound get this annoying ‘pitched higher’ sound. I hope you understand what I mean.

So if I have understood correctly, the FORMANT MODE is what maintains the characteristics of the sound while pitch-corrected - which is good by default - but not this time since I would like to make that ‘real pitched’ non-formant sound - still maintaining the tempo of the vocal event.

I played around with the algorithm types and then made Cubase detect those notes and then manually pitched them higher but the vocals still sounded ‘natural’ which I don’t now want just with this one project. So I do NOT want that pitch changing be Formant.

I still want to explain just to make sure that you know what I mean;;; it’s like if I made for example a 20 second long vocal event to play back as a whole in just 10 seconds (NO time-compressing!) by just making it play back twice as fast so that the picth frequency would double up — and THEN applying the time-(de)compressing to that audio event by making it twice as long (meaning, back to 20 seconds from 10 seconds) and now of course maintaining the pitch – then this time the sound of a vocal event would be what I want.

I hope You understand what I’m trying to say here :slight_smile:

SO:::: I want a tape-like effect as played back too fast and then time-compressing it again to be longer.

How would I do that easily?

Thank You.

VariAudio does not preserve formants, as I understand it.

Have you tried just applying VariAudio to your audio, selecting all, and dragging up however much you like? Definitely get the “chipmunk” effect when doing that.

You want to use Pitch Shift function from the Audio–>Process menu, see the screenshots I’ve made for you. If you want a tape-like effect, untick Time Correction.


Its DOES preserve them, at least it tries to.

I’m pretty sure Variaudio uses the standard solo algorithm which has no formant correction.
It has been a feature requested for years and if it was already doing it Steinberg would surely have responded with this info by now.

Okay, you must be right, as I’ve never particularly investigated this topic, but I’ve always had impression that the Solo algorithm doesn’t just do time-preserved pitch correction without formant preserving. I mean every now and then I make artificial backing vocals, even transposing a copy of vocal part up an octave and it doesn’t sound formant-shifted, often it sounds like a vocalist just sung part octave higher.

I’ve just conducted a little experiment. I recorded a piano note from HS preset “Natural Grand”, and tranposed it up an octave using different methods:

  1. VariAudio
  2. MPEX offline transposition with formant preserving
  3. MPEX offline transposition without formant preserving

To my ears, VariAudio sounds much more similar to MPEX with preserved formants (which is no surprise to me). You can listen to the files here:

https://yadi.sk/d/IWO3_4jUowPeL