Unable to Pitch Correct human whistling and piccolos

[dana@danacountryman.com]

Hi folks,
Here's a dilemma I've NEVER figured out:

When trying to pitch correct audio that is super-high (piccolos, human whistling, etc) I don't get a continuous, segmented line to edit, as in vocals. Instead, the pitch line comes all wacky, with nothing seemingly connected. I've tried to edit this mess, but the audio isn't affected, whatsoever. How can I control this kind of audio for pitch editing?

See photo example of audio of human musical whistling...

http://www.danacountryman.com/pics/WhistleAudio.jpg

help.

[crduval]

I'm not in the studio right now but I remember reading that DP's pitch correction can be set to either a voice or instrumental setting. Maybe this would help?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[magicd]

The pitch correction is looking for a monophonic tone. It's optimized for the range of the human voice.

One of the problems with a whistle is that the breath content is seen as low frequency noise by the pitch algorithm. You could try processing the signal first with a high pass filter to remove the breath noise from the sample. That may help the detection.

Dave

[ramadev]

The pitch correction is looking for a monophonic tone. It's optimized for the range of the human voice.

One of the problems with a whistle is that the breath content is seen as low frequency noise by the pitch algorithm. You could try processing the signal first with a high pass filter to remove the breath noise from the sample. That may help the detection.

Dave

It's little gems like this that make us greatly appreciate you being here on this forum Dave! Many thanks...again!

[Shooshie]

Try hitting COMMAND-RightArrow. That zooms in. Sometimes after a few zooms you will get all the segments you need to edit the whole pitch line. If that doesn't fix it, I'm all out of ideas. Dave is probably right about the noise thing.

Shooshie

PS: I've done whole albums of piccolo and of flute, and I was able to edit pitch on both, though fortunately it didn't need it much. (really top players, thank goodness!)

[Shooshie]

One more thing: if you're editing the pitch to match another instrument in unison, I've found sometimes it's best to copy the pitch from one to the other to avoid phase issues.

S.

[dana@danacountryman.com]

Thanks, guys ---- i can't seem to solve this problem, but I appreciate your input....

-dc

[Shooshie]

Thanks, guys ---- i can't seem to solve this problem, but I appreciate your input....

-dc

Dana, did you zoom in? That looks exactly like my piccolo recordings before I zoomed in to increase the resolution. Zooming in extended the length of the notes and provided the extended pitch handles that I needed to edit them.

Oh, and I remembered another thing after looking at your screenshot: use the scissors tool to cut the pitch handles between notes. At least, I THINK that's what I did. I'm pretty sure that's it. When you do that, it analyzes each note individually then. It's apparently connecting them all together right now, and it thinks it's one note.

C6 is not that high. Pitch editing works great at that range. You just need to help it make sense of individual notes.

Let me know how it goes. If that doesn't fix it, I'll revisit those files and see exactly what I did, but I'm pretty sure I'm remembering it correctly.

Shooshie

[Guitar Gaz]

I too have found gaps where there appears to be no note to pitch correct. Sometimes its because I have edited soundbites and merged soundbites and the pitch info has disappeared. I guess the pitch correction is magic but it can't do everything. Interested to know how the missing pitch notes can be found.

[dana@danacountryman.com]

No, I was not successful at cutting what few audio parts I saw with the scissors tool. I looked a the manual, and it says that audio represented by "gray lines" are not editable. That's how much of these audio files come out: A few super-high editable lines a the EXTREME top and bottom of the file, with gray bars in the middle. Hmmmm.

[FMiguelez]

Not whistling directly into the mic can help reduce the amount of noisy blown air.
Record it at an angle, otherwise, as you've seen, DP will have a hard time telling apart the noise from the actual whiste sound.

[dana@danacountryman.com]

The whistling has already been recorded by a contributor in another state. It's really not bad, so I'll just live with it, the way it is...

Thanks, all!

[stubbsonic]

I'm just grabbing at straws here for a PLAN B:

Create a copy of the track (but with a separate copy of the soundbite)

Use DP or even some other process (like Audacity) or Apples AU Pitch Shift, or AudioWish's Octave Shifter2, or Forever for Now's Diatonic Shifter to pitch shift the audio down one, two or three octaves (maybe try 3 octaves first just to see if it does something useful).

Now see if the pitch analysis is better.

[stubbsonic]

Oh, then I left out the part where you somehow get that pitch info up to the correct octave and put the original track back. I don't use DP's pitch stuff much.