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Anyone found a miracle tool for pitch shifting a capella choirs recorded in rich acoustics? We have tried the Eventide Orville and the Prosoniq MPEX3 for Pyramix, but they all make heavy artefacts on harmonically complex material.

We're talking about a scaling of 10 to 30 cent of a semitone, but the quality need to be excellent and work with 192 kHz in no less than five channels in phaselock.

Comments

anonymous Mon, 08/08/2005 - 22:52

If you can stand some variation in tempo then pitch adjustment by changing the sample rate is an option. If you absolutely CANNOT let the tempo change then you are in hot water.

The TC System 6000 can do a decent job without getting too grainy I am told.

I recently had a situation with a capella choir doing the Thompson Alleluia in a magnificent single take that was a 1/2 step low by the end. I made incremental changes along the way so it maintained pitch and maintained sound quality (24/88.2) but the faster section near the end was so frantic sounding that the director opted for keeping the flat one.

Rich

JoeH Tue, 08/09/2005 - 10:08

Lindberg wrote: Our preffered method up to now has actually been the varispeed on the Genex 8500 Analogue output AD into the SADIE or Pyramix. But I was hoping to find a smoother and cleaner method ...

Well, as Ben already mentioned, Elastic audio in Sequioa and/or Samplitude V8.2 just might do the trick. You CAN select pitch change without tempo change, and vice versa. (The old method is also still available in the software, I believe, but EA is smoother and does a nicer job.)

Depending on the complexity of the material and the amount of pitch change required, you may be able to pull it off without anyone hearing the difference. I just completed a choral (Chamber Choir) CD with many minor pitch corrections using EA. The music director did not have perfect pitch, but he knew were the "Sags" were, and we were able to fix a multitude of "sins" (whenever there was no alternate take available) and create a more desirable finished product. (It's not a live performance - all studio recordings - so we felt the deception was justifiable, artistically.)

Give it a try, if you have a chance. I believe the online demo may actually work for that as well; you just probably wont be able to "Save" anything.