9.5 Pitch Issue

[muscletn]

MOTUNATION is once again proving to be an invaluable forum for all of us!
We'll get this one licked. In the meantime, I'm back to 9.13.

[James Steele]

Considering the whole point of DP 9.5 was to introduce these new 'improved' pitch features I have to say I'm amazed that MOTU didn't pick up such a whopper in their testing.

I sent a report and a link to this thread to MOTU support - let's hope they are aware of the issue by now.

Everyone's always amazed and these "whoppers" yet honestly, it's quite possible that things like this get through.

[muscletn]

I THOUGHT that the unpredictable pitch anomalies were gone once I went up to 9.51. They largely are, except for a new little wrinkle.
While tuning a vocal, and using the Pencil tool, I straightened out the last few parts of a phrase. Around four measures later the pitch went stratrospheric for the first few notes of that new phrase. Unlike in 9.5, I was able to undo the Pencil tool edit.
In the middle of a phrase the anomalies don't seem to happen; only at the end.

I went back to 9.13, did the intended Pencil tool edit. All was well. I then re-opened 9.51 and the edit remained intact. Hopefully, we'll get some first-hand answers at NAMM next month.

I had heard that this issue was largely confined to the old Mac Pros (cheese grater). Mine is a 12 core, 3.46 old Mac Pro; OSX 10.10.5, 64 gigs RAM, Universal Apollo, two UAD PCIe cards.

[toodamnhip]

Hopefully, we'll get some first-hand answers at NAMM next month.

Tha NAMM show is a promotional forum for MOTU> The idea that one can go there to discuss “bugs" is kind of silly. They will be very polite, maybe give you a card, ask you to file a tech link, and pretty much deflect any serious conversation about bugs. The most you will get, and I mean the MOST, will be “we are aware of the issue and working on it”.

Been there, done that.

[Killahurts]

Yep, happened here too. select a note and move it a little, notes before and after go insane, random places. Crazy.

Pitch automation has some serious issues, but I'm sure they will iron them out soon.. I do like where they went with the new features and quality.

[Timeline]

Well, AT 8.1.8 sucks too. It overshoots in DP 9.51 and Antaries wont offer support in DP I'm told.

Is this a DP issue? Maybe so.

[toodamnhip]

Well, AT 8.1.8 sucks too. It overshoots in DP 9.51 and Antaries wont offer support in DP I'm told.

Is this a DP issue? Maybe so.

It is very often a DP issue. If I could ask MOTU for one “upgrade”, it would never be “better next gen pre poo”, it would be to re program their inner architecture to play nice with others.

[Timeline]

I'll buy that. Might be Prime Millisecond settings are off under studio settings. What is yours set to?

[muscletn]

From a conversation with MOTU at NAMM: For monophonic pitch correction, use Pure DSP Solo Vocal setting in Audio Preferences. For multi-timbral pitch and Time Stretch/Compress, use the new ZTX settings.
Hopefully this will stabilize the pitch issue, and allow full use of 9.51.

[muscletn]

Further conversation with Matt LaPoint from MOTU suggests a workaround for the issue:
Create a new soundbite, within which the pencil tool edit can take place without affecting the succeeding audio. After merging, the edit remains intact, and the succeeding audio doesn't randomly and intermittently pitch into the stratosphere.
MOTU is aware of the issue. Thank you Matt!!

[Timeline]

Changed over to pure D and it's definitely better thanks. But, some voices just have too many competing harmonics and screwup the algorithms in auto tune and other tuners. I find this the case when using tube mics and tube preamps once in a while. Too many harmonics can mess up a good thing.

Also, the reaction time to making VERY quick jumps in pitch sometimes add to the result as a pitchy tone, when retuning vocals. There's the lot of pop record makers too that just take the Cher approach and use the effect version of tune that of coarse destroys purity for the sake of the effect and hard shifts the tone to absolute. I think the reason its so popular is when you hear that effect your brain just relaxes and you know its in tune. I'm VERY sensitive to pitch and even I would prefer the effect rather than pitchy vocals once in a while.

The human story on autotune is still being written. Glad MOTU is working on it!

[HCMarkus]

Some voices just have too many competing harmonics and screwup the algorithms in auto tune and other tuners. I find this the case when using tube mics and tube preamps once in a while. Too many harmonics can mess up a good thing.

It is interesting how some voices can be tuned, even Autotuned in automatic mode, with nominal impact on timbre, while others just become a mess. In my experience, voices with brighter timbres generally seem to result in fewer discernible artifacts when tuned.

I have clients whose voices are never sullied by Autotune. It is "touch up a note within DP" here and there at most, and Pure DSP handles that job beautifully. I also have clients who never hear their voices without AT... I keep it on their vocal tracks at all times. A good take for these clients is one where I don't have to tune a bunch of notes in DP just so AT in Automatic Mode can put the intended melody in tune. Ouch.

I have been enjoying the new pitch algorithms when transposing instruments. It is great to have this high quality complex source pitch shifting at our fingertips now; ZTX has saved the day for me a couple of times already.

[bsitler]

Using 9.51 now... Have had an issue for awhile, like most of you that still isn't worked out with edits on pitch at beginning of a phrase effecting the rest of the phrase in crazy unpredictable ways. I've still not got that worked out.

However, and maybe this is only working for me, but when jumping from DP8 to DP9.51, I also was having issues with it loading the pitch correction data and was having to start over with any corrections that I'd done. Weird thing is that I have found that saving it, closing it out, then reloading it again ... it for some random reason picks up the pitch edits I'd done in the past and suddenly I'm good to go. It's such an odd work around but once it's done, there's no more issues. Problem is that it has to be done for every project I've worked on, but at least I'm not having to redo all the work. Hope this helps someone out there.

[bayswater]

Weird thing is that I have found that saving it, closing it out, then reloading it again ... it for some random reason picks up the pitch edits I'd done in the past and suddenly I'm good to go.

It would probably be useful to file that with MOTU as a techlink. Looks like the edit are there, but 9.5.1 can't see them until they are read in from a 9.5.1 project file. if so, that's something that should be fixed in an update.

[HCMarkus]

I've only had the problem on the one file I noted earlier, which was a created in 9.13, then got only in 9.5. I just opened it the other day to prepare alternate mixes and the wonkiness was still present in 9.51. That said, I had other copies of the problem file in other places in the tune, so was able to cut & paste and iron the issue out. I fixed it prior to installing 9.52, so can't know if that would have resolved the issue.