Slightly increasing the speed and pitch of your final mix- anyone do this?

[SLiC]

I read below with interest and gave it a try, anyone else do this with a master?

http://blog.presonus.com/

[AsPeeXXXVIII]

Nope.

[legendCNCD]

Yes, but slowing down mostly and its not a case I'd do a lot anyway. I'd go back into the tune and slower the speed

[skipscada]

First of all I'm a total amateur and make music for myself, so you have no reason to take any notice of what I say.

I read about the tape speed trick in an article about 60s music somewhere (probably Sound on Sound) and just tried it. Now it's almost a habit for me to increase the speed on the master mix by 5 %, with time stretching to maintain the same pitch. It tightens up the timing and ups the intensity without doing the material any perceptible (to me) harm. Works for me. I'm sure the audio quality suffers somewhat, but that's very far from being the weakest link in my process, and my lead ears don't pick up any problems. When I've finished a track, I've usually played the parts so many times I'd normally be able to go back and record it again at a higher tempo, but when a track is physically finished, for me it's also mentally finished, and I can't be arsed to record it again.

Reducing the speed of a master mix ... can't see the point of that except as a gimmick, making a slow track even slower.

[Nielzie]

Never thought about this before. Interesting.. Will try

[Googly Smythe]

I used to do this back when I had a Portastudio, and was recording everything to tape. The deck has had a variable speed dial. But when I got a Cubase, and was syncing the synths plaback via Cubase/SMPTE (stripe on track 4), I had to stop. Speeding up the tape didn't raise the pitch of the synths - I couldn't be bothered to mess around trying to tune them in, and then tune them back again.

[_al_]

Actually i'm kind of obssessed with sparkly top end, and creating custom bus setups that allow me to distort, reverberate and blend in groups of sounds, so no, i don't do this. I'm actually trying to train myself to tone down the high end.

Also, i think multiband compression can give you all the high end you need (as long as the samples allow for it)

[Samplecraze]

Someone explain to me why pitching your mixes up by 5% is beneficial, and please don't give me 'tighter timing' nonsense as that doesn't apply unless you're quantising. If a tune is not tightly pitched speeding it up actually exasperates the sloppiness, not corrects it.

Genuinely want to know.

[Michael L]

Genuinely want to know.

I don't do it (I have a note/freq chart on my desktop) but The Police increased the speed/pitch of "Every little thing she does is magic" by 50 cents. Rick Beato talks about it starting at 0:22
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZavJLr5Otq4

[risome]

This was an old trick back in the day ..worked better on high end tape machines
A slight pitch up or down on the tape speed playback often worked wonders for tracks.
Made it harder for people to copy stuff as the tuning is slightly out.
No point these days in the age of near pitch perfect computer based recording.

[Samplecraze]

Thanks.

[MogwaiBoy]

I do it in FL Studio but I go the other way, tuning DOWN the master pitch. In that case you LOSE top end but you can gain epicness by shifting the whole track into a deeper vibe/key/slightly lofi.