Although I always use Melodyne or Steinberg Vari-audio for tuning vocals, I thought I’d give Spectralayers 8 pitch shift a go to see how it sounds. I had asked for shift by semitone and it’s here which is great, thanks. But the actual quality of the shift with formant preservation on is not good. Lots of nasty overtones/harmonics on a cleanly recorded vocal. Not a big deal for me but if someone really wants to use Spectralayers for pitch shifting I think some improvement is needed. I’ve only played with new version for an hour or so but I think debleed will be very useful. Ed
i never used it on vocals, i use the pitch shifting for Sound (Brut) Design (i call it these days Sound Brut Design, in lack of a more better term…), so if it introduces artefacts, which i don’t really hear, or like, it is for me about the result.
in my experience it looks like pitch shifting does the job quite well.
but perhaps i should test it on a clean sample, if i have one.
everyone works in there own way. but still curious if this is really a problem.
strangely, using samples, made from scratch (from different sources, also from ‘scratch’), that have strange proporties, i tend to use them more in high quality, 32bit float for example, because, if you use those samples, every treatment, must be detailed.
i use artefacts, that was my main thing, but -and i already did of course the things you must do to keep them working in a mix, or that a simple an sich had quality, although, it wasn’t ‘pure’-, i see now that sculpting them better, not all, improves them, for further treatment, or within spectralayeres itself. and the untreated ones gives other results, because the spectrum is too full, with rumble, etc… cleaning them gives other results. so one sample can give more new samples.
long story.
but i am also more interested in the pure stuff in spectralayers, because it expands my workflow, and results.
I get some better results when I lower the FFT size (e.g. to 640 samples) before transforming a vocal. On some operations the FFT size is really important so it´s worth a try.
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The perfect pitch change would have to be when it is able to change frequency/Semitone without affecting phase. I dont believe anything does that at the moment (not even melodyne).
When you’re able to change a pitch and revert back to the same state (without affecting phase) thats when pitch shifting will be perfect.
Most of my software (Melodyne, Cubase, Elastique) can do a very good job of it. As I said in original post, I wouldn’t use Spectralayers for pitch shifting anyway, but thought I’d test it . I’m going to compare it with V7 tomorrow on the same example files and see if V8 is the same or worse than before. Ed
Ok all. A quick example. Dry vocal. Original provided. Then a 2 semitone upwards pitch shift with formants preserved. I used Melodyne Studio, Soundforge Pro Elastique, Spectralayers 7 and 8 pro. As I keep saying, I don’t use Spectralayers for pitch shifting of vocals, but it would be nice to see higher quality if I ever needed to. Eddie
Files uploaded randomly are 1. Melodyne 2. Original 3. Soundforge Elastique 4. Spectralayers 7 and 5. Spectralayers 8
Remember (as said in the comments above) that SL is a spectral editor where most tools and processes depends on the setting the best spectral settings first. For instance with your example, if I set FFT Size to 1024 and Resolution to x4 I get something much closer in SL8 to what you get with the other apps:
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Good tip. I was just using the default settings. I suggest the programmers make the defaults show off the program better. Thanks for the demo. Ed
so resolution also effects the result? have i read the manual, and i asked it before, or o well, my mind… and i memorized it well, i thought FFT size… and sometimes, it depends also on source…
o well my mind…
in the importance of FFT size, resolution isn’t mentioned.,i can get great results from spectralayers, but it seems i still learn! which isn’t strange. by the way.
Also as I said before, pitch shifting will probably never be perfect. It doesn’t matter if you’re using melodyne. When you change the pitch of something, the phase changes, the only way pitch shifting can be perfect is if you’re able to change the pitch and then save that file state and revert back to the original pitch without changing the phase… Every time I have tried changing the pitch of something (it didnt matter if I was using Melodyne or any other program or any other setting) and reverted back to the original pitch, the phase was always off.