When I happen to very intensely process samples, my tracks tend to drift out of tune. Sometimes, you may want sounds to be less obvious harmonically (percussive and experimental of all sorts) only later to find out when you add much distortion or reverb that they no longer seem to match. Also, just watched on youtube how even high-pass minimal phase filtering affects the tuning, so there are plenty of ways to lose your way without instantly knowing it.

Also, once you drift away, retuning is a very destructive process and needs to be done sparingly.

What are your experiences? How do you keep control and re-tune when heavily processing? Do you know of some reliable tuner with stable reading? One trick for both tuning and checking the tuning that I use is a/b'ing with a comb filter.

 

Sorry, I don't understand what you mean when you say out oftune in your tracks. Are you talking about recorded instruments? of voices? what is it that out of tune ?

 

All you can do is use a pitch correction vst! or what ever Daw you use should have pitch up or down [cents]
But sometimes music sounds ok detuned!

 

Celemony - Melodyne (www.celemony.com/en/melodyne/what-is-melodyne)

MTuner [Free]

✅Feature Rich ✅Free ✅Themes ✅ Polytuning Windows Mac

Download: https://www.meldaproduction.com (download the FreeFxBundle and then choose to install Mtuner separately)

Mtuner is perfect for those who want a big-sized plugin that can fit your whole screen. If you want to make it smaller, there is a setting at Settings->Style->Size you can use. Dive into hundreds of settings and fully customizable colors.

The tuning algorithm is superb, and though the plugin would have been better off with more instrument presets. It’s a solid tuner.

GTune [Free]

✅Small GUI ✅Lightweight ✅ Chromatic ✅Free Windows Mac

Download: https://www.gvst.co.uk

 

I am not sure what you refer to is what I think you mean - but the issue may be in "intermodulation", the amplitude modulation of combined signals containing two or more different frequencies, caused by nonlinearities (or time variance) in a system. The intermodulation between frequency components will form additional components at frequencies that are not just at harmonic frequencies (integer multiples) of either, but also at the sum and difference frequencies of the original frequencies, and at sums and differences of multiples of those frequencies. Volume-balancing, filtering, phase reversal and application of suitable (extremely) short delay on individual components of a desired "complexity" of signal may overcome or prevent a (perceived) de-tuning in the resultant.

 

Thanks for all your replies. I know both plugins. Gtune turns out more stable in that it flashed interchangeably 2 rather than 3 different keys on a single kick being played continuously. Ableton's onboard tuner showed a stable single note reading but stopped working. Meantime, I have found out it might not work when separated from the sampler by 3rd party plugins - yet-untested hypothesis.

With kicks, the best method I have come up with since last post is to tune 2 octaves higher - you can tell by ear easily then. If I can't find a working non-frantic tuner (I wish they kept the last reading visible and allowed freezing) , there is this dominant frequency method, although the peak in the kick I selected for the project had its high point wildly swinging across several notes.

I agree some detuning has a good effect. May get in the realm of micro tuning actually but a kick playing half a tone higher than expected - I don't want this kind of surprise. For now, I think I will be keeping a reference track with little to no processing and a clear root note.

 

From what I understand. You mean the harmonics, which add up in the mix.
If it is that. There are several ways that I find, although to be honest, I am not one of having these problems or I did not realize it until now.
But if I deal with "nuisance frequencies" which would be the same as "unwanted harmonics" or "unwanted notes" I think we are always talking about the same thing".
From my point of view, Fabfilter EQ 3 is the best option.
If you don't hear the note of the Kick you can use Surfe Eq that shows you the Tonic of the notes and has the option to follow the tonic or main note, although if you want you can also change to another note so that it is the fundamental note. After another vst that I saw but that the truth I did not understand very well, it is "torque" of waves. I've seen them use it to tune the notes of "kick" drums, "snare" drums, you can take a look at it.

 

On the subject of the tuner: it can display false frequencies if the perceived main pitch comes from the high frequency components, but in the lower frequency range of the sample another noise "fakes" a different frequency. For this reason, I also tend to use the aural method.

QuikQuak - Pitchwheel VST - www.quikquak.com/prod_pitchwheel.html

 

Last edited: Jun 21, 2022

So here is an update. First, mtuner is a fantastic tool, thanks Beat16 - I overlooked its stabilisation and range functionality, which is hidden in the tuner menu.
By what you are folks saying, it might be just me that is running into these problems, but have a look:

A simple kick, and all the colours were blinking like crazy until I stabilised this and narrowed down.

As for synths, based on what you say, there must be something either about the type of processing or one of the effects maybe which does mess up tuning. I have yet to look into this.

Thanks for your help. For now, transposing the kick by 2 octaves is the most accurate method, and with synths, mtuner should suffice.

 

Isn't detuning a key component of any synth sound? I recall a famous musician, whose name escapes me, saying he can't stand the sound of synths because they always sound out of tune to him.

 

You can also try MAnalyzer from MeldaProduction, it shows key and frequency on peaks. You have to configure this in settings of the plugin.

 

Last edited: Jun 22, 2022

I think every time you do any sort of exaggerated processing to a sample destructively, it degrades its original quality (in some way). I try to leave as much of the processing done by the effect as I can, and I may replace it if I think it's going to take a lot of processing to get it where I want. The goal being avoiding repeated destructive edits and saves to the same waveform. On all of them. Each time you destructively edit, there is any tiny amount of noise or other undesirable content caused by processing; and you are compounding it every time. Like summing analog noise, but directly into your samples. Pitch, drift, whatever bad things just get multiplied. Fixing things can be either time consuming or impossible by then.

It really depends what type of samples you are processing, too. If you were to be pitching around drums, as an example. Do you warp a 4 bar long loop, or chop it up into hits first? How far away are you moving something from it's root note? All of those considerations come into play, but repeatedly bouncing will magnify anything negative done to your original audio file. That's one thing you have most control over. Not the negative, but the repeating of it. Higher oversampling in your plugins can help more than you can hear listening to it while processing in realtime. If you have a bunch of them, rendering it once is really an eye-opener if you haven't. But it takes forever and is offline processing.

I have over the years become almost heartless about deleting stuff early in a project. By the time you have processed the sample into something you love, you have destroyed it. It really sucks when you find this out after you realized you should have used a better quality starting file and have now built an entire tune around something you cannot easily replace. This is an easy way to kiss about 4 hours goodbye.

Flex Time in Logic is a neat way to extract pitch from audio files, into Midi. You can put another part behind it or something to keep you away from that early project destructive edit.

Another little trick, if you have to start bouncing things, is to disable everything on the track; but keep it exactly as it is until you can delete it without much concern left.

Your thread title had me expecting something about Antares products. Sampling, oh we can talk about samples all day. Melodyne users should offer tips and tricks. :D

 

Last edited: Jun 22, 2022

I'm so confused to what you are referring to. Are you talking about atonal samples (with no clear fundamental frequency)? Or even and odd harmonics? Or just adding synths that are out of tune?

 

Obviously you are not talking about vocals as people just speak now and call it music.

 

I'm thinking more of the take "4 seconds of audio from a record you found for 2.50$" as your source material. Real products like Kontakt libraries are not going to be wildly out of pitch (hopefully). But random loops and samples from any unconventional sources is more the issue. But not individual root notes all key mapped out for you, as a HQ commercial product.

Many sample-centric producers will swear by tools like Pitch N time, Elastique, Tonic, and others; to minimize as much of the effect time compression and expansion processing can have. Or they get into Melodyne, as well.

 

Yeah. Simple fine-tuning/transposing.

 

Hi All
Sorry for a late reply. the matter keeps evading me. Must be intermodulation as an artifact of heavy processing indeed. One way to deal with it I that still proves useful is to use a comb filter to tune up track content. A hardly audible "pin" does the trick in most cases although it messes up transients. A Transgressor2-like processor doing comb filter apart from EQ would be ideal.

 

I sort of tend to think that if someone's adding so much processing that a track no longer sounds in tune that's a clear indication that's a bad idea. Like, "I added so much ghost pepper to my pizza I went to the hospital, what should I do?" But not actually knowing what it sounds like I could be wrong.

 

Might be When it comes to audio spices, I am Thai sometimes.