About the bitcrushed/formant vowel sounds...

[CMACD]

heavy processing can quite easily alter the perceived pitch of a sound. especially when dealing with distortion, banpass and highpass filters, and more esoteric things such as formant filters and bitcrushing.

ive experienced with this myself, where a kinda squelchy modulating noisia-esque sort of bassline i made sounded most in tune with a sub bass playing six semitones different to it.

some filters will compensate for level increases when the resonance goes up by bringing the volume down which could quite easily change the predominant frequency to the cutoff rather than the fundamental. also if your filter self oscillates that will mess up the tuning.

amphibian was right though - do what sounds right. numbers and stuff are all great, but you don't hear those when you play the track do you?

Yeah, exactly. I just found it weird cause... I could understand the example you're giving, sometimes with distortion/filtering/what not the actual note that's coming out of the speakers is like half an octave away from the one you hit on the keyboard, cause you ended up bringing out the harmonics more than the original note... this was specifically a semitone though, which I couldn't see that happening with. I lost the .flp for that track anyways so it's scrapped, heh.

[Filthzilla]

Lowpass you are a genuis!
Thank you for the diagrams on Res, I've always wanted to know what gets excentuated so that I can combat it in the mix.

Big up.

[antipode]

Resonance: your best friend or worst enemy.

[Brian Oblivion]

with midrange bass you are chopping off the fundamental frequency also to make room for the sub, so if your harmonics are also mangled to hell with combs/formants/resonant filters etc things can sound out of tune with the note you are playing. It's not something that happens very often for me but I have noticed it before.

[Assassin]

For some weird reason in the track I'm working on, it sounds more "in tune" that the note I'm playing on this particular midrange bass sound is a semitone lower than the sub (and yes I checked the pitch of the oscillators and everything). Just find it kinda weird and was wondering if anyone else noticed this??

I don't have a technical answer for you - but "pitch" inadvertedly gets affected (i don't think it's the actual pitch, but our ears make it out like it is) just by playing with cutoff and resonance - considering that formant filters are a combination of these two, I would not be surprised if that's the case.

sorry, but that's completely wrong

pitch is not affected by filter cutoff/resonance... our ears don't make it out like pitch either. filters just add/remove/attenuate/accentuate certain harmonics. they don't change the pitch

Eh??

So if I have white noise and I raise 440hz and turn everything else down it doesn't sound like an A note?

[Assassin]

For the sake of simplicity, let's say we've got the signal pictured below

the fundamental frequency would be 2 Hz, with 4, 8, and 16 Hz being harmonics. For example, let's say that 2 Hz is a note called X, 4 Hz is X up one octave, 8 Hz is also X (up another octave), and 16 Hz is yet again also X (up another octave).

A lowpass filter, will simply decrease the amplitude of any frequencies above the cutoff frequency, sloping downwards at different angles depending on the filter strength. What resonance does is introduce a peak just before the cutoff frequency, amplifying any frequencies in that range. So when you change the cutoff of a filter, you're changing the location of the resonance, which means that different frequencies are being accentuated. This doesn't change the note though, because the large majority of frequencies will be harmonics of the fundamental.




(it's crude, I know)

here's a better picture I found of a resonant filter

But this isn't a low pass filter I'm assuming. Instead it will be raising certain frequencies in order to make it sound like a vowel, therefore it could in effect have taken enough volume out of the fundamental to stop it being recognisable as the note in question.

Besides this OP, why not just resample that bit and pitch it up by a semitone - problem solved!

[Sharmaji]

played-out sound is played-out

[Assassin]

played-out sound is played-out

[zerbaman]

Phigure is gassed.