By jonestown massacre
Thu Feb 25, 2016 5:08 am
FrankWhite4Mayor wrote:MPC-Tutor wrote:FrankWhite4Mayor wrote:Why would one speed up the sample instead of pitch shifting or time stretching when there's a 99% chance you will be out of tune? In other words you're bound to land between notes.
Lots of reasons, multisampling for one. Also with the 'FINE' control, there's no reason to go out of tune. Also the SEMI control is pretty good, i.e. +1 = one semi tone. It only goes out noticeably at very high tunings (at which point you fine tune it).
Pitching up or down also gives the sample a different timbre. A tuned down drum break is darker than the same break timestretched to the same BPM. A high pitched drum break is brighter and 'chripier' than the equivalent timestretched break. Same goes for most types of sample.
Thank you for the insight Tutor,
I get what you're saying, but when manually adjusting the speed (let's say on a turntable) any change would definitely result in a note not being at 100% pitch. Any bass line / instrumentation added to the project would be off / require tuning unless one instead tunes the sample. I agree with you when it comes to sampling drum sounds (darker/lighter timbre), but couldn't all this be done by pitch shifting? Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't pitch shifting perform the exact same function with the exception of being able to control the amount of transposing. When pitch shifting, the change in speed becomes the unknown variable where conversely, when changing the speed of the sample the pitch is unknown. I tend to think isolating pitch to whole of half steps would provide a better premise, and possibly time stretching after... I know there are many ways and approaches to ones work flow but this always crosses my mind when seeing ol'skool cats make beats and use the pitch on their turntable before sampling into the MPC.
Again thank you for explaining this...
Waaaaaaay overthinking it. The slide adjuster on a Tech is labelled "Pitch Adj." (ie: exactly the same thing as pitch shift).
On the MPC you are just adjusting pitch incrementally according to semitones and cents (digital) where on the turntable its just a continuously variable slider (analog). There are also some known settings to bring your samples back into the original pitch range from some standard speed settings on the turntable.
If exact tuning is super critical you can just use a tuner plug in to dial it in too. Melodyne is supposed to be pretty good for that but I haven't used it since it first came around.
Good question though.
nogginj wrote:sometimes you make too much sense too early jones and it leaves us blinded ;]
