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DaveC
March 2nd, 2007, 08:28 PM
This came up on another thread, but it's an interesting subject (to me anyway).

With 2" - back in the day (for me) I used to love varispeed stuff. Changing the playback speed to pitching it up or down a bit with guitars, pitching up and down more for big choral BVs, it was great.

For people new to the technique - maybe you have heard the chipmunk voice effect where a voice is played back at double speed. Not only is the pitch of the voice raised, but the timbre (tone, character) is also changed. That's the basic magic of varispeed, but not usually done to such extremes. Record a voice. Then double it with the same singer, but with the tape playing (say) slower. The singer has to sing in tune with the slowed down track - ie at a lower pitch than before. Then, when you platback at normal speed, you have 2 voices singing in time and in tune with each other, but they have slightly different timbres and qualities.

Can this be done with DAWs, Alishad HD and Alishad LE?

A couple of guys say the HD Sync IO can do it. How flexible is it? Can I do the same as I could with tape - run a (say) 44.1KHz session and send clock speeds infinitely (umm you know) +/-10%? +/- 100%?

Is there a cheaper thing that will do this for HD? Can the same be done with LE and an 002 - sending variable clock speeds through light pipe or SPDIF?

And finally - does it acheive a similar effect to doing varispeed with tape? Can't see why not, but sometimes you just don't know till you try it.

I miss varispeed since moving on to DAWs - if the Sync IO will do it, so be it. If there is a cheaper way - even better!

lebouche
March 2nd, 2007, 09:00 PM
I suppose you can do similar things with voice designer.
I used this a few times...could only find a link to an old one. Not sure if there is a more recent release.
http://www.midi-classics.com/p14322.htm

spkguitar
March 2nd, 2007, 09:12 PM
If you have one of the digital tape machines available (DA88, ADAT), I'm pretty sure you can do it with LE by clocking to the tape machine unit and using the machine's vari-speed functions.

Funny part is, I have PTLE, a DA-78, and an ADAT and I've never actually even tried! :)

:lol:


*EDIT*Confirmed: when clocked to my ADAT XT20, the varispeed functionality does exactly what you're looking for with PTLE.

DaveC
March 2nd, 2007, 09:38 PM
spkgtr - that is brilliant thinking! I'll have to pick up one from soemwhere. Presumably you just set the varispeed of the adat, and you don't actually have to press play or even have a tape for this to work?

spkguitar
March 2nd, 2007, 09:58 PM
That is correct. All I did was set PT to clock to the ADAT. There's no tape in the machine. Using the speed buttons on the front of the ADAT unit changes pitch and speed of the PT session as it is playing back.

I think I did try this a long time ago when I first got these units (memory fails as I get older ;) ), but I've just never had an occasion to use the feature.

This, of course, won't work for sessions over 48kHz, but... that's to be expected with the ADAT format limitations.

HOOK
March 2nd, 2007, 10:36 PM
Thank you ! This is great things to know!!! :grin: :grin:


HOOK

Pancho Ballard
March 3rd, 2007, 02:54 AM
If I had to pick one thing I really missed from my old Roland VS-880 (and amazingly, despite the wonders of PT7 there are plenty of things I miss about it) it would be the vari-speed function.

I only really ever used it in a subtle manner - made drums sound thicker, my vocals thinner, stuff like that - but I really miss it now I can't do it. I wrote a song in Bb the other day, purely to please our horn section, and I would have killed for varispeed when recording the vocals!

6x2
March 3rd, 2007, 11:22 AM
Great tip, spkguitar!

I got one of those awful adats lying in the corner, I might just give it a go!

Thanks!

6x2

vocalnick
March 3rd, 2007, 01:21 PM
As I said in the topic mentioned, I'm pretty sure I've seen this done in Samplitude, but I have no way of checking at this juncture. It's a trick I used to love using on analogue tape too.

Clock-fudging aside, I suppose you could pitch shift a sub-mix by xx% (without time correction), track to that, then reverse the process and re-import... but it's nowhere near as immediate as tweaking the knob and punching in.

I never used it for doubling, but it was great for introducing some tonal diversity if I was recording my own backing vocals, for example.