Turtlerock Forum

I have a piece of music I need to put live brass on, but it is 44 cents sharp on A440. I've never asked a brass player to tune that sharp. Can they do it? I'm talkin Alto Tenor and Bari Sax, Tenor and Bass troms and regular Bb trumpets.
Vocals were already recorded and I'd prefer not to pitch them down...
Cheers.

Its a bit much for all of those instruments to tune that much and not effect the overall tuning of the session.
You have a few options though
Retune the session with a digital varispeed changing the speed of the session when recording - best way I have found is using the Digi Sync I/O and use the varispeed function - this I have found to be the best way to deal with this without ever using having to use digital tuning processing after the session is done (melodyne ATune etc)
Or - use good old analog tape with 44.1 tone printed on the front of the reel and use a guitar tuner to varispeed the machine to track the brass +/- 44 cents.
Hope that helps - Ive been in this situation many times in the past

HI Chris, yeah varispeed is what I was thinking. Won't be tracking to tape unfortunately but I can do a similar thing with pitch shifting and no time correction. I think tuning up it works out to A=451 or there abouts. It's not quite a quarter tone but tuning the vocals down even with time correction makes them sound like they are on valium..
Thanks.

Hey Andy,
So what mics will you use to track with??

Long time brass player here (more than a third of my life!) and I've got to say tuning is difficult at the best of times (temperature, humidity, reed condition, lip condition, style, etc) so definitely try to put the track at the correct pitch and then alter the horn parts rather than the other way around. Also the formant change will be relatively unnoticeable at that level of varispeed versus the change in timbre of voice etc. I have done this digitally before simply by varispeeding a bounce (don't worry about the quality of it as long as the pitch is accurate) and then altering the horns to match the original with the best process I could access. I find autotune is foul on horns though, it makes them sound like bad FM synthesis.

Good processors are melodyne, soundhack (non realtime and free!) and pitch'n'time by soundtoys.

M

[quote="13thbeach"]Hey Andy,
So what mics will you use to track with??[/quote]

What we have at our place ... mainly 87's, fet 47's, SM69, couple of geffels but can't remember the model number, the long black one with the 2 interchangeable heads that sounds good on bassy stuff.., maybe um70's?
I kinda suggest stuff but leave it up to Rod who engineers. I will have enough to deal with on the charts...

Yeah Myles, got Melodyne but won't use it probably. Had a listen to the track varisped down and it should be fine to record then go back up, it's really not as far as I thought it would sound, but it's just enough to take the shine off at the lower pitch. Plus people have been listening to it at a=450 or whatever it is now so they are used to it.
Onwards and upwards,
Thanks all.
Cheers.

just to re-iterate...i've found melodyne to be very easy to use, however distorts transient content, in an adhoc fashion. I've had to edit vocal sibilance from the untuned version, when using it on vocals.

I can imagine the sharper/harder harmonic content of brass, really bringing that artifact out.

Suggestion of rendering ur tracks.... pitching up the rest of the music, then recording to that would be alot safer and easier...