Pitch Based Clichés

Playing with pitch provides great opportunities for creative studio approaches. Top of the list of common clichés here is the up or down octave shift to a track for fun and hopefully profit. Analog pitch shifters have been an interesting studio toy for some time, offering their own unique sound as well as the pitch change. Today’s digital, microprocessor controlled units can create believable, ‘this really was sung an octave lower’ sound, and can transpose as well as linearly shift pitch. If you have ever used a pitch shifting patch you have probably also discovered and maybe even found use for the various satanic, robotic, or chipmunk-on-helium sounds that seem to happen without even trying. But the world of pitch shifting is more limitless than even that would suggest. Pitch clichés run the gamut from extremely apparent to barely detectable, from organic to mechanical, from musical to mystical.

The bass on Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time” on So is impossibly huge, unbelievably deep. Well, it’s awesome. That’s simply an aggressive use of an old analog pitch shifter, cranked up in the mix. They chose not to hide the effect, but to highlight it.

On the more subtle side, consider thickening. Thickening requires two pitch shifting units (or a single stereo unit), hopefully of extremely good audio quality. The track to be thickened, often the lead vocal, is sent to the pitch shifters for a slight pitch shift, one up 0.1% to 0.5% (or about 3 to 9 cents) and the other down. Very slight delays in the 5 to 25 millisecond range may be added to the outputs of each. Use slightly different delays for each of the pitch shifted vocals and return them to the mix panned some distance apart (usually dry vocal down the middle, shifted vocals panned hard left and hard right). Place the thickening vocals well below the dry vocal, in that “not audible” to perhaps “barely audible” range. The result is a vocal track that uses more of the spectrum while still remaining in key, and sounding believable. This is a very common mixing cliché useful for helping the vocal compete with walls of guitar sounds and rich, phasey, reverberant, expensive synth pads.

Straight ahead octave pitch shifting and thickening are pitch shifting standards, but countless other pitch altering techniques await your exploration. Your analog tape deck is eager to be a pitch shifting device. If you’ve got a vari-speed function, overdub with it. Consider a slight change in speed for a guitar doubling, recording the part in varispeed without retuning the guitar. This essentially creates a one-sided thickening effect through more analog means, with a different sonic texture than a digital pitch shifting unit might create. If you have the tracks, you can do additional doublings at other speeds until you’ve built the tone you want. More interestingly (though not necessarily more musically), try more severe varispeed adjustments and do retune the instrument to the varispeed key. When played back at the original speed, the character of the instrument has changed as you have modified the instruments’ resonant tonal character (we call it formant) by recording at a different speed.

Taking a more literal approach to pitch shifting can make your tune richer: slightly retune or detune an instrument before recording a doubling. No Varispeed here, just change the pitch of the source: the instrument itself. Rhythm guitar parts take on new depth when the two parts are microtonally out of tune with each other.

The tape deck has other pitch modifying tricks up its sleeve. Try going into record immediately from a stopped, tape’s-not-rolling status with the instrument already playing. You’ll be printing while the machine gets up to speed, giving you a pitch change on play back. Check out the start of “Synchronicity II” by The Police for a demonstration. Guitarist Andy Summers gets his guitar sound (feedback included! That’s cliché #117B I believe.) happening and then the record button is pressed. The result is a unique, ear catching announcement that the song has begun.

With the forwards/backwards/any speed/any pitch potential of samplers, pitch shifting is a creative frontier that could take forever and a day to make heads or tails of.