Topic: Digital Speed and Pitch Correction

[Frequincy]

Do people change the pitch of off speed tape sourced recordings by ear or some other reference?

[live2496]

I have used a guitar tuner on sustained notes before.

edit: do you mean analog tapes? or digital recordings?

I guess I should explain my answer. I had to digitize a reel to reel of organ music for one person. They told me what key the songs were in and I used the guitar tuner with the pitch control on the reel to reel to get in on the correct pitch.

If you mean digital and the pitch is off (somehow). Maybe this is an error in the wav header or something?

This is what I would do. Set up a song in an audio editor and find a sustained chord or note. Set the software to loop it and check the tuning with a guitar tuner. Another alternative if you can bounce that looped segment to a file is to do an FFT on it and view the graph. The fundamental of the note should be the peak. Har-bal is good for this. http://www.har-bal.com .

Here is a frequency chart from their site which shows the values in Hz for notes and range for instruments...
http://www.har-bal.com/index.php?/frequency-chart.php

Yes, by ear works too. I guess it depends if you are a musician or mathematician by nature.    YMMV

[Frequincy]

Yea it is a digitized recording from an analog tape transfer. I didn't do the transfer. I really wan't to hear it at the right pitch/speed because the recording is really quite good for it's age, except the pitch is driving me crazy. I have a Protools rig at my studio with several plugins to try to get the best result. Digidesign has the one they include but I believe there's also one in my Waves bundle.

I'm sure I could do it by ear being a muscian. I like math too though, I have a nice chart of the piano with the corresponding frequencies a lot like the one from your link.

Thanks for the info and the links, much appreciated  , as I've never done this before.

[Roving Sign]

can take a little research - depending on the artist...have to make sure they dont tune to a non-standard tuning...

[Krispy D]

A=440 is all you need to know, the rest is relative.  That was a bad musician pun by the way...

[Frequincy]

A=440 is all you need to know, the rest is relative.  That was a bad musician pun by the way...

Or multiples thereof...880

[keith]

One thing to watch out for is that some analog tape recorders don't hold their speed very well, i.e. at the beginning of the tape it may be running at a different speed than at the end of the tape.

This drove me completely nuts once when I had to sync audio from a cassette recorded on a machine that drifted badly to video recorded separately.  I had to break the recording into blocks and adjust each block to the correct speed.  The end result gave me a decent compromise over the whole recording, but it was a pain.

[Frequincy]

One thing to watch out for is that some analog tape recorders don't hold their speed very well, i.e. at the beginning of the tape it may be running at a different speed than at the end of the tape.

This drove me completely nuts once when I had to sync audio from a cassette recorded on a machine that drifted badly to video recorded separately.  I had to break the recording into blocks and adjust each block to the correct speed.  The end result gave me a decent compromise over the whole recording, but it was a pain.

Yea this occured to me after reading over some other threads on syncing analog sources with digital ones. I'll have to go through the entire concert and check it out. Iv'e read that a lot of fluctuations can occur towards the end of a tape. Thanks for the input.

[jefflester]

One thing to watch out for is that some analog tape recorders don't hold their speed very well, i.e. at the beginning of the tape it may be running at a different speed than at the end of the tape.

This drove me completely nuts once when I had to sync audio from a cassette recorded on a machine that drifted badly to video recorded separately.  I had to break the recording into blocks and adjust each block to the correct speed.  The end result gave me a decent compromise over the whole recording, but it was a pain.

Yea this occured to me after reading over some other threads on syncing analog sources with digital ones. I'll have to go through the entire concert and check it out. Iv'e read that a lot of fluctuations can occur towards the end of a tape. Thanks for the input.

Can also be a problem with battery operated portable recorders if the batteries were weakening. During the recording the tape slows down the further into the recording it gets, so on playback it speeds up. And it gets worse the closer to the end.

[Krispy D]

A=440 is all you need to know, the rest is relative.  That was a bad musician pun by the way...

Or multiples thereof...880

there is a local music shop in the town I used to live in that's address is 440 A main st.  Priceless!