Tag: pitch

Pitch Primer For The iPhone/iTouch

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on Pitch Primer For The iPhone/iTouch

The Apple iPhone/iTouch software market is amazing. Games, tuners (like the great Strobe tuner). Even AutoTune things like I Am T-Pain.

Now, there is the Pitch Primer for the platform. It is amazing. Transcription tool? Sure it could be. Amazing practice tool? YES! Amazing idea? YES! It is easiest to see a demo of it. Things that I’d like it to do would be EXPORT the audio you recorded (several other iPhone/iTouch programs can do this). And it would be killer if it would export things as a midi file. Or Music XML file.

Amazing product. Get it now while it’s $4.99.

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Auto-Tune Abuse

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on Auto-Tune Abuse

I came across this article from Hometracked.com.

Pitch correction software has applications from restoration and mix-rescue to outright distortion of a voice or instrument. I’ll discuss some of the more tasteful uses of these auto-tune tools (whether the original from Antares, or a variant like the free GSnap) below. But first I thought I’d highlight their misuse to illustrate the effects we usually try to avoid.

I think the second example on the page is more of a vocoder thing, ala Gorillaz or Peter Gabriel. However, there is a band I play in where we are trying to do a CD, so, we hired someone to record us live. After 3 months, he had two songs done, and I’d say they are not anything to write home about. He even put in clapping which makes it sound even more fake.
When I record, I try NOT to do much to it. Balance it, sure, but pitch correction…..not really, unless there is something that totally sticks out like a sore thumb. I had a two or three songs that students did before Christmas that I had to do some pitch correction with, but it was not the whole song. Just a couple of notes here and there.

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Interesting iTunes Alternative

Posted on By ericdano No Comments on Interesting iTunes Alternative

I came across Create Digital Music’s discussion of Native Instruments BeatPort SYNC. It has a lot of interesting features such as:

  • Two-deck mixer with manual/automatic crossfader
  • Pitch control
  • Time-stretching and tempo detection, for smooth crossfades even if you don’t know what you’re doing (or you’re, say, folding laundry or cleaning your studio and want the software to DJ for you — it happens)
  • Rip and burn CDs
  • Access external devices for browsing and backup
  • iTunes library integration (no playback support for DRMed tracks, though meta-data will appear)

For me, the time-stretching function would be welcome. Currently, if I need to slow something down, I have to drag it out of iTunes into Transcribe. That works well, but being able to do it within the program would be so much easier.

Alas, I wasn’t able to test it as it loaded fine, but proceeded to try to analyze my iTunes library, which, in it’s current size, could take days to do. But, this might be a good alternative to people who need pitch and tempo controls and like the iTunes type interface (who wouldn’t??)

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