Best pitchshifter for beat mangling?

[Resonator63]

No mention of Loomer Shift yet.
There i've put that right
http://www.kvraudio.com/product/shift-by-loomer

[Krzysztof Oktalski]

Old school samplers didn't have granular pitch shifting in real time.

Not directly, but artists have been using sample start for granular control of samples since the late 80's. With this method you could easily pitch shift in grains, and then use the AR section to control the dynamics of the grains. The size of the grains were determined by the smallest note you could repeat in your sequencer.

[Ah_Dziz]

Old school samplers didn't have granular pitch shifting in real time.

Not directly, but artists have been using sample start for granular control of samples since the late 80's. With this method you could easily pitch shift in grains, and then use the AR section to control the dynamics of the grains. The size of the grains were determined by the smallest note you could repeat in your sequencer.

This is true and the effects generated this way are fun. in my experience though the sort of effects being discussed with regards to manipulating breaks are most easily and effectively achieved with standard resampling pitch changes. Using rapid repeating notes along with sample start modulation or even loop modulation with loop crossfades can definitely get you closer to granular synthesis but is less applicable to the sorts of drum rolls with increasing or decreasing pitch that was originally asked for. Either way any of the current crop of software sample playback engines will let you achieve any of these scenarios with little trouble. If you like to program your drums by dropping hits onto audio tracks in your DAW then these techniques will be harder to achieve.

JJ

[overhishead]

what is the diffy between a pitch shifter and a frequency shifter?

also, how do you get a sound that sounds like this?

[Krzysztof Oktalski]

Using rapid repeating notes along with sample start modulation or even loop modulation with loop crossfades can definitely get you closer to granular synthesis but is less applicable to the sorts of drum rolls with increasing or decreasing pitch that was originally asked for.

Not sure I agree - T-Power was doing a lot of this sort of sampler based pitch effect using hardware in 94, I'm sure I can think of some earlier examples, but plenty of pitch/filter/sample start manipulation on his SETOAIM LP :



The pitchshifts at 4:40 or 5:24 are classic examples of this technique. Isn't this what he was describing? I've heard some great shifts done that way, no shifter required.

Once you've got your beat in grains, manipulating pitch (or other parameters) is easy - I know someone doing that sort of thing using a Casio FZ-1 and that was out in 87, but by 96 the main methods were sampler manipulation, internal sampler timestretches or Eventides. Not trying to distract from Pitchfunk, obviously, but there are several different methods and they all yield slightly different results. With Pitchfunk we added a collection of methods (mostly early ones) - they're all useful in their own way.

If it's the Eventide-style shifts he's after then another demo of Pitchfunk might make him happy. We made that by listening to lots of Movin Shadow and Reinforced stuff from 92-96, so it might be right up his street if he spends some time trying to apply it. That can do these sorts of stretches :



However, if, as he says, he's after something for "playing with the pitch of breakbeats within a pattern, such as pitch staircases and pitch drops, pitchbending and playing samples on different keys in a traditional "tape style" sampler or a tracker", he might of already answered his inquiry and would be better advised to find a sampler that he likes that can do all this stuff, either hardware or software.

[Krzysztof Oktalski]

what is the diffy between a pitch shifter and a frequency shifter?

I think a frequency shifter refers to a Bode style shifter, which is an analogue method, or sometimes an early phase vocoder (although I think that is explicitly a digital method...Dave will correct me). They've got more of a ring mod vibe - Bode invented those too. When they're analogue, they're called Bode/Frequency Shifters :



Pitch shifter usually refers to a digital method of shifting frequency.

Eventide Harmonizer (H910 - released in 74?!)

also, how do you get a sound that sounds like this?

Probably by scratching through a Kaoss Pad on a delay setting, with a very short delay time, and changing the delay size every so often to change the pitch.

[paradiddle]

Sounds like an lfo with varying speed on the pitch. Maybe a comb filter. Try ohmygod vst. It has an lfo. You just put it on the freq. I'm playing with this right now and you can get similar results.

what is the diffy between a pitch shifter and a frequency shifter?

also, how do you get a sound that sounds like this?

[xx JPRacer xx]

what is the diffy between a pitch shifter and a frequency shifter?

Pitch shifter multiply: keep harmonic relationship
Frequency shifter add: don't keep harmonic relationship, create dissonance.

[Sendy]

I've emailed Dave @ DMG a couple of times over the last 3 or 4 days and not heard anything back. I'm still really wanting to demo Pitchfunk because I think I missed a few tricks last time I demoed it. I have been checking my spam folder!

We used to do cheapo granular synthesis on our old Akai S900 by just blasting the thing with 64th notes and sweeping the start point with the knob. You then had to record the result onto dat, possibly several times so you could pick the best result. Of course, a sampler with a decent modulation parameter set makes this kinda thing a lot easier.

Here's an example of the kinda thing I'm after:



Especially in the 2nd half, there are extreme pitch shifts, but the beats are always punchy and don't turn to mush at the extremes. I've heard SP uses an Eventide for DSP effects, and that it's expensive.

BTW it's weird seeing that T-Power track, I was listening to that yesterday at 50% speed to analyze it. Yeah, I can get like that when I'm bored

[Krzysztof Oktalski]

Yeah, that technique is exactly what I'm talking about - after the 950 samplers had better routing, so you could control that kind of thing easily - but I remember mates taping themselves adjusting the knob and then resampling that.

Dave may not reply in the next few days, he is mental busy this week. He released a bunch of updates the week before Beardyman flies out to do a TED talk, so I expect sleeping is a luxury he can barely afford.

Most of the modulation on the Squarepusher drums sound sampler based, but those stretches are interesting, I'll try and find the proper answer. Sometimes you can get a sound a bit like it with E-Mu's EX3's Twistaloop turned on - so I'd look to samplers with internal stretch algorithms. I've never really wanted any extreme amens, so it's not something I've ever tried, but it is an intriguing sound.

[Sendy]

Thanks Krzysztof, as it turns out I decided to get Pitchfunk anyway, so I don't require assistance. I decided to buy on the strength of the audio demos etc (and my own impatience). Of course, that doesn't mean my pitch shifter quest is over, I doubt it ever will be. But there's a lot of good stuff I missed in PF the first time I tried it.

Next I want to see how spectral/additive based pitch shifting sounds on breakbeats. I'll post any results I get if I consider them interesting.

On a slightly unrelated note, speaking of the S900/950, if anyone ever recreates it's digital lowpass filter in software, I'd be super happy. You could only set the cutoff at note-on, and there was no resonance at all, but it sounded amazing, especially on snarerushes coming up or down in cutoff. Each new part of the spectrum that appeared really seemed to 'pop' into your ears. It's a digital filter so I don't see why we couldn't have a full emulation in software.

[Krzysztof Oktalski]

Thanks Krzysztof, as it turns out I decided to get Pitchfunk anyway, so I don't require assistance.

Cool, hope you enjoy it! There's a few techniques in there you just can't get any other way, or without a lot of old hardware. We accidentally released a slightly borked version of Pitchfunk, 1.03; I just tried the next version and it's fixed, but it may take Dave a little while before he uploads. I'm sure it'll be in the next couple of days, sorry for any inconvenience; it's partially my fault, I didn't bash it thoroughly enough.

I remember the 950 filter...I'm sure it wouldn't take Dave long, but I'm not sure how useful it would be by itself, I suspect that the sound is determined by that and a load of other elements interacting. Might be a bit 'meh' without modelling the behaviour of the DACs, aliasing, bit reduction, etc, too. I'm still not happy with the workflow of any of the sampler plugins I've got, so hopefully one day I'll persuade Dave that the next project needs to be a sampler that does what I want, which I suspect might be pretty similar to what you'd be after too.

I'd be interested in anything you achieve in these fields and anything you hear that seems like unobtainium. Glad you liked the Pitchfunk demo's - I did them in under 10 minutes (with a lot of instances), never really thought of them as serious demos at the time. There are further methods in the pipeline for Pitchfunk - we've always been a little scared of the idea of including algorithms that will make multiple instances unusable in that mode, because a single instance would consume your CPU. It's the support aspect that makes it scary - you might be able to understand why we'd done it, but that wouldn't be true of all users. Real time pitch shifting processes that can be modulated are costly as regards processing, but we're not done yet...we just need a bit more Moore's Law!