You’re starting to sound like Eventide’s Ultrachannel, Millarlicious. Have you used it or seen it?
They were giving it away a year or so ago, got it then, use it on guitar once in a while.
how would this be approached for STEREO tracks? In other words I get that on a mono vocal the detuned parts are spread rt/lft etc, but what if I had, say, 2 guitar tracks already panned out sort of wide?
Would the detuned parts just be spread out relative to each guitar track then? like if the left guitar was panned out to 55, would I just pan the detuned parts to, say, 65 and 45? or what?
Thanks, JJ
Let’s assume you have a plugin that can shift the pitch of a track by cents. Would there be a way to emulate what’s going on here, just using that and duplicating tracks? I’m just trying to understand what this is doing and if I can easily emulate it without any extra plugins. If it’s just harmonizing, it seems like it should be straight-forward. It’s just something I’d like to experiment with.
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if its just shifting the original down or up few cents, then it seems that one could emulate it
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sing a vocal over your songs chords
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pitch shift the songs chords up, say, 10 cents…sing the vocal again on a different track
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pitch the songs chords down 10 percent and sing the vocal again on a 3rd track (edit, meant to say “10 cents”, not “10 percent”)
obviously its a lot of work and could be hit and miss the same as regular vocal doubling is . could be cool in certain parts of a song though
The SoundToys Microshift was designed by the same guys that wrote the code for the Eventide H3000 and the Neve harmonizer. It’s detuning as you know…I’ve also heard considerable rumor that it was discovered by accident. So @StylesBitchley, I agree with you there. The quirk where the detune drifted by a certain amount got modeled into the sim plugins because people ended up liking what it did, among other things.
People have been doing this since the Beatles. And Ozzy. And Iggy. It’s a tried and true “technique”. Kudos to you for figuring it out for yourself without having to copy others. 
Jon, in my opinion, its easier to use the plugin than to detune duplicated vocal track. One of the reasons is that its much easier to manage a plugin ON a track, than manage a second, third, and fourth track.
??? Wait a sec. You want to pitch shift the vocal. Not the chords of the song. 10 percent is quite extreme. I would recommend starting at +/- 1 cent…then graduate to 10 cents…then widen from there if necessary.
I look at this as a completely different technique than stacking vocal takes. I probably wouldn’t use the harmonizer unless I intended to use the pitch shifting function.
[quote=“Jonathan, post:29, topic:2582, full:true”]
10 cents is the same as 10%?? Im not sure on that. However much then, 3 or 6 cents or whatever. I was thinking things were being shifted by around up to 12 cents. Maybe im thinking of guitar.
In any case it could easily be experimented on with just a few short vocal lines before tackling a while song
The song itself is being shifted up or down only temporarily so that when the singer then sings along with it the singer is thus laying down a sung vocal that will be 10 cents up or down.
Obviously then the song itself will be returned to its normal pitch while the pitched vocals will be left pitched
In the end you end up with a normal vocal plus one shifted up and one shifted down
As far as it being easier to use a plug-in, yeah i agree but thats not what she asked lol
I am saying that a plug in will more or less exactly vary something by +/- whatever % you program in. Whereas if a person purposefully aims to double a vocal up or down a few cents, the person will VARY of course, but no more or less than a person varies when doing regular doubling. So in the end, an actual pitch shifted SUNG line might be even fatter than a “perfect” harmonizer one
If you think about it, this is close to what doubling is anyway, especially back in the analog days with wow and flutter etc etc
Frank Zappa or someone has probably already done this lol
Another easy way to test it. find a song where u already SANG a good double. take the sung double and shift it up or down a few cents. There u go
To clarify terminology, cents are defined units of measurement just like semi-tones and octaves in an even temperament system. A percent isn’t. It has to be relative to something. To say 50% doesn’t mean anything unless declare something that 50% is half of.
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@Cristina, you’re on ProTools…right? I think you have this plugin in your stock library…you can use it for a pretty similar effect.
yes Im aware what a % is
I was trying to figure out where u were getting ‘%’ from in the first place. I see that I said “shift the sing up 10% or whatever”
I meant to say “10 cents or whatever” not %
I generally tune my guitars e,a,d strings a few cents flat because inevitably they will go a bit sharp when fretted on big frets etc
for the record, evidently 100 cents = one semitone
ok, I was mistakenly under the impression u wanted to do this without plugins altogether. I see I read it incorrectly. Ignore what I said lol
done with this thread guys, peace, JJ
Now that I think about it, I might try setting up an aux track with a flanger and autotune to see what it would sound like on a group track of background vocals.
The idea is that you add a slight pitch shift and it will sound like another take singing the same thing. It doesn’t really sound like another take, but it it does add a thickness without the predictable chorus phasing going on that you get from adding small time shifts.
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REAPER actually. I just wanted to see if I got the gist of what you all were talking about. I think I do.
you can use reaPitch. Set up 2 pitch shifts and pan them left and right (or however you want).
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Yeah that’s basically what I do, and then add slight delays as well, or other effects. I like the level of control with just duplicating the tracks myself.