Pitch driver is not phase coherent

Nuendo
1

Hi,

I’ve noticed that the pitch driver plug’in is slightly out of phase.

I have a session with two mono tracks, same source on both tracks. One has a pitch driver inserted, the other no inserts. This results in some phase cancelation when mixing both tracks.
Pitch Driver settings are Detune: 0%, Mix : 100%, Spatial 0%, Output : 0dB

Bypassing the pitch driver solves the issue.

I encountered the problem in Nuendo 13.0.40, running windows 10.

Bests,

Thomas

2

Interesting. I haven’t noticed this issue (I’m still on 12.0.70), but I did notice a long time ago that PitchDriver doesn’t work well with stereo files. They sound like they collapse to mono, so I only ever use it on mono content (dialogue, etc.).

3

Pitch changes are made with delays, so I would expect that the plugin changes phase coherency.

4

Yes, delay and pitches are very dependent, though the plug-in was set to 0% Detune, so i would expect it to be pretty transparent.

5

Why do you think that?
Just because the detune is set to 0% means nothing.
You don’t know what happens under the hood. It’s an effect plugin.

6

Hi thomas_martin,

PitchDriver is merely designed for sound design purpose. The latency of the plug-in varies depending on the material. So even for a Detune value of 0% the latency is a rough estimation.
If your use case is timing critical, please use one of the other possibilities for pitch shifting Nuendo offers.

Andreas

7

thanks @andreasm for your response.

In my current use case, there is no problem. I discovered this because there was an error in my mixing session (plug-in should have been bypassed).
Yes, I use this plug-in for sound design (varying pitch to get a funny effect), but I could see at least one use case where it could be a problem. And I also can think of at least one workaround (inserting pitch driver on both tracks).

I just wanted to let Steinberg team and users know about this in case
a) it’s not an intended behavior
b) someone has the same problem in the future.

Bests regards,

Thomas

1 Like
8

I noticed that even if you bypass pitchdriver from 5.1 track it still causes strange things to the balance.