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What software or plugin has yielded you the most convincing vocal pitch-shift?


rasputin1963

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So you're doing an arrangement,   and you want to pitch-shift some of the vocals.

 

 

What software or plugin to date has yielded you the most convincing pitch-shift?     ie.,  not only a good sounding formant,   without chipmunks or Darth Vader,   but also a track devoid of clicks and gaps and other noisome artifacts all-too-typical when digital audio is pitch-shifted?   Have you ever created a pitch-shifted vox line in a mix.. that was utterly convincing,  even when played solo and untreated with FX?

 

ras

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rasputin1963 wrote:

 

 

Have you ever created a pitch-shifted vox line in a mix.. that was utterly convincing,  even when played solo and untreated with FX?

 

 

 

No, and I honestly don't think anyone else has either.  People have become so acclimated to these effects like pitch shift and autotune that they no longer hear the telltale robotic vibe that some of us can hear, no matter how subtle.  I think it probably has been/could be done to very small degrees of pitch change with a well trained vocalist and manipulation of tape speed.  If you go too far from the original pitch with either analog tape or digital the vibrato will always give it away and digital plugs just have something funky about them that sounds, "unnatural" to my ear.

 

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That's be interesting.  If someone pitch-shifted one or two notes in a song and did it expertly, I doubt I could tell even soloed.  If they applied it all the way through, then, well, I think it would be obvious even if the person went at it easy (which no one seems to do! :D).

That's about as objective as I'll probably get in discussing pitch-shift.  I'm so freakin' sick of it.  I was sick of Auto-Tune in the '90s, so you can only imagine how I feel about it now that it's utterly inescapable.  It's boring, tired, hackneyed, and ugly.  It makes good singers sound crappier and crappy singers sound a different kind of crappy.  Either way, it's crappy.  

I feel like everyone who uses blatant pitch-shift is someone I don't know.  It's sort of like this.  Lotsa people say phrases like "Don't hate the playah, hate the game" or "YOLO" or "that's just how I roll" without trying to be ironic or funny, but I don't know anyone personally who says 'em.  I feel the same way with Auto-Tune.  I don't think I can think of a single engineer who enjoys the sound, yet that's all I ever hear on pop and rock songs.  Weird.

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In my opinion Melodyne to a certain extent(a personal disqualifier). The problem with pitch correction in general is formant preservation and when soloed you will always notice a differnce, however, those who listen to it outside of you are less critical and not as intimately attached would not tell the difference at all unless the CHER effect is present.

I think it's time we steer away from these tools at least for vocals and live with the recorded session with most of the bad notes intact for posterity's sake as a true record of one's accomplishments and deflate some of these recent Artists ego's.

 

 

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I really think the way to go is offline pitch shifting. Real time ca be okay but offline almost always sounds better. 

The best algorithms IMHO are from zPlane and iZotope. zPlane is what Sound Forge uses and I believe Ableton Live and Mixcraft as well. Sonar's offline transposition uses the iZotope algorithm but a limitation for me is that it only does semitones. For background vocals I'll often create a premix in Sonar, drop it down a semitone, sing along with it, then pitch the vocals up a semitone. I don't think anyone could tell it was pitch-shifted unless they know what my voice sounds like normally. All the background vocals in

of "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" were done this way.

For real-time, Melodyne gets the nod.

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CTStump wrote:

 

 

In my opinion Melodyne to a certain extent(a personal disqualifier). The problem with pitch correction in general is formant preservation and when soloed you will always notice a differnce, however, those who listen to it outside of you are less critical and not as intimately attached would not tell the difference at all unless the CHER effect is present.

 

I think it's time we steer away from these tools at least for vocals and live with the recorded session with most of the bad notes intact for posterity's sake as a true record of one's accomplishments and deflate some of these recent Artists ego's.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I think most of the current best crop of tuning software has formant preservation either built in or as an option.  Not that it's perfect, of course, but it does really help.

 

When I first tried out the pitch correction that comes with Sonar, I could hear a sort of hollowed out, combfiltery sound on anything and everything it touched.  Then, being a newbie with this stuff, I discovered that you could turn on a formant preservation feature and about 90% of the artifacts went away.  To just tune stuff - where you're moving mere cents around, I have to admit the software these days is pretty darn good.  That's all I ever do with it and I avoid even that most of the time - another take is almost always attempted first.

 

nat whilk ii

 

 

 

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Lee Knight wrote:

Melodyne

+ 1,000  thumb.gif

You absoultely cannot tell slight corrections in pitch or vibrato.  Creating harmonies by copying and pasting the melody onto itself and then dragging the notes around to work out a harmony part is incredibly useful.  I then have real people sing the Melodyne derived parts, but in a pinch they're good enough to use as background vocals.

Melodyne is massively better than Antares.

*edit*  I should add that I only use Melodyne offline, not as a plug.

Terry D.

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The key, for me, to using Melodyne, is to not ask it to do all the work, but to do the heavy lifting myself. By that I mean, dividing the analyzed notes into even smaller pitch center blobs and then... leaving the blobs that are either swooping into or out of the note body. I'm not flat lining anything, I'm only seperating the bit of the note, the "body" that was fairly stable, if off a bit in pitch, and then moving that whole little blob to pitch center, with all internal deviations intact. Think of it as the correct average pitch...  and for the body of the note only.

This way you leave any flattening (as in pummeling) of the note alone. I just don't go there. I like the sound of those performance attributes. This allows the pitch center of the performance to be rock solid while leaving everything else alone.

Melodyne does a wonderful job of smoothing pitch transitions between unedited and edited notes... So I let it do what it does so well, and I don't ask it to slam the entire note into Backstreet Boys hell.

That's where the artifacts come from. Now, if you desire, you can do massive pitch shifts (for generated harms, etc) with way less issue. Just fix the body of the note, not the whole thing. Use the divide tool to allow you to isolate and correct the body only. Way more work, way better results.

 

 

Plugin vs. Offline

I'm not sure if I'm really aware of the difference. I used to use Melodyne offline but have since switched to the plugin. I don't hear any more artifacts. I do, however, bounce the Melodyne edited track down, minus all processing except Melodyne of course. Then I import that melo'fied bounce back into the track and turn back on all my processing. Sounds great without any artifacts (if I edit properly). What am I missing here? 

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