Routing and slowing down audio

Strutter · 2023-09-05T18:46:30.082Z

I’m trying to make the OT a more central part of my setup and consider having a Tascam 244 4-track going through it so that I can run stuff from my DAW onto a cassette and then be able to pitch it down and run it through OT’s FX.

I know that the digital to analog conversion will probably have a negative effect on the audio quality but do you guys think it’s somehow meaningful?

I’m aware that this might be a really dumb question but as I’m too tired to think this through atm I’ll just add it here as well:

When pitching audio down by lowering the cassette playback speed, it usually sounds better to me and I wonder, shouldn’t it sound weird as the pitches are going out of tune, in relation to each other? Or actually not in relation to each other but out of the chromatic thing anyways.

trackerjack · 2023-09-05T19:10:09.276Z

Don’t worry too much about D/A conversion, seriously, most interfaces will do fine if you pay some attention to gain-staging.

With regards to tuning, the original pitch relations will always be preserved. So no, it shouldn’t sound weird, except for the tonality changing, the more you deviate from the original pitch.

If you have perfect pitch, I imagine it might feel weird to land between the tunings you’re used to. But not so much as to make it unbearable to listen to. Otherwise I believe people would keep talking about it and it never gets mentioned.

And yes, I think it’s a meaningful idea.

Strutter · 2023-09-05T19:22:03.405Z

Thank you for the answer!!

On the tuning question, my goal is to possibly record some more stuff on top of the pitched down audio and my concern is that thats when things might start clashing and getting out of whack.

I too was thinking that I haven’t seen this issue discussed here but still in my mind this might cause a problem when adding stuff to it.

One solution of course would be to record the added stuff over the un-downpitched stuff and then repeat the process with it accordingly.

trackerjack · 2023-09-05T19:29:51.713Z

Ah, okay.

Yeah, in that case try to always transpose in semi-tones, when you pitch down. A tuner can help obviously, but it’s not hard to achieve by ear, or close enough, just have a keyboard ideally for pitch-reference.

That way you don’t have to tune every new instrument / part / overdub / whatever. Just transpose the new part accordingly.