Reverse Engineer Pitch Envelopes

Cubase
,
#1

Is there a way to create a pitch envelope on audio so that it pitches it opposite to it’s natural pitch so that the resulting pitch is monotone?

I need to convert sounds with more complex pitch envelopes into sounds at a static 22hz. I’m do a lot of conversions from waves into wavetables in Serum, and even though Serum is supposed to have it’s own algorithms to deal with pitch in a similar way, it’s very often doesn’t work well. I know that Celemony has something called “Capstan” which is meant to fix warped vinyl and kinda seems to do something akin to what I’m looking for. However, it’s $4500. That’s probably because the algorithm is designed to deal with pitching a full song, so it has a lot of work cut out with drums and orchestra and vocals, etc… all playing at once. I just need to pitch single sounds with more defined fundamentals.

Is there either some hidden way of doing this in Cubase or a 3rd party plug in/software someone can refer me to?

And if not, then it would be great if this was a feature in Cubase.

#2

Have you tried variaudio? If it manages to correctly detect the pitch of the audio you’re trying to process then you can use the ‘straighten’ function.

I say ‘if’, as it appears that the sounds you are dealing with are at a very low frequency.

#3

Michel Rouzic’s Photosounder can flatten audio, as demonstrated here https://youtu.be/undU5wWnUdU
But isn’t what you’re trying to achieve what any vocoder does? Or any pitch tuner: SB’s vari audio as mentioned by Joe90, as well as Celemony’s Melodyne, Antares’ Autotune, Waves’ Tune, etc. Even Native Instruments’ Kontakt, using its Tonemachine mode :slight_smile:

Good luck!

#4



No. I don’t want to warp the vocals. I want the format and timbre in tact. Vari Audio, Melodyne, Auto Tune, etc… perform time warps in order to keep the audio from being faster or slower when you warp it.

#5

The tutorial is hard to watch, but I don’t think the person demonstrated what I’m looking for. His audio seems to be about 1:10 long in the original, and it’s the same 1:10 at the end. If he had applied real pitch curves to pitch the high notes down, then the resulting audio should be much longer.

That’s not to say that the plugin can’t do what I’m looking for… just that so far I don’t see what I’m looking for. I’ll look more into it though.

#6

You can always apply the pitch envelope as a direct offline process, then draw in the envelope by hand using your ear? Time consuming but it should work, just head over to the envelope tab in the pitch correction process screen, and turn off ‘time correction’.

#7

Well… yeah… I mean that’s very obvious/basic… But I want something that’s exact. Doing it that way could take sooooo much time, but what I’m more concerned about is that the pitch wouldn’t be exact. For the purposes I need it for, the pitch needs to be basically exact. 1-2 cents difference can cause phasing in the wavetables I’m trying to make and with just a few cents off the reference pitch, you will get annoying clicks from the phase change.

I mean, technically I could probably spend a few days perfecting the pitch envelope for one sound… but I’d rather go through 11 seconds of sound and cut out each zero crossing and export as a single cycle wavetable… (not very practical)

#8

Could you be more specific? What is the exact usecase? Why do you want to do this? What is the context of this operation? Can you provide a couple of samples or the material of which you are trying to flatten the pitch?

Greetings,
JHP

#9

While I think there would be a LOT of cool sound design and mixing applications for this feature, the specific reason I want it right now is to import sounds to wavetables in Serum (or potentially other wavetable synths):

Pages 53-59 of Serum’s manual explains the processes of importing audio to wavetables inside Serum.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/decembercymatics/Serum_Manual.pdf

Although Serum actually already has their own optional automatic algorithm for importing sounds with a moving pitch called “Dynamic Pitch Follow”, it almost never works well. I’ve had really good results manually importing wavetables into Serum, but the pitch needs to be exactly 22hz for it to work well. 1hz off in either direction is acceptable.

I’ll make a video shortly to better show and explain what I mean. (but also keep in mind that there could be tons and tons of other cool uses for this feature).