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Been using ableton's transposition. Makes it sound way too muddy. Is there a better way? Looking for something like what's used in this (25 secs onwards)

I reckon there's a specific hardware effect all the big commercial people use.

But having said that, you can come pretty close if you get a few different software pitch fx like melodyne, autotune or just vst pitchers like 'pitchwheel'.
So you have a few different sounding algorithms too choose from. And actually try them out each time . .

It's long though and annoying to work with.


Good idea to eq or filter before you pitch it down, ofcourse.

Yeah melodyne is probably your best bet, there really isn't a great way to do it in my experience... depending on the quality of your sample it may work well or you may be sol

My first question is WHY a whole OCTAVE?...ultimately everything needs to be in key, so with that in mind, you can mix the vocal pitch down in semitones without going a full octave down. BUT if that's what you're after, make sure the warp option is set to complex/complex pro..this retains most of the original transient effects of the pitch. OTHERWISE, Melodyne is your best bet at vocal manipulation....but still....you shouldn't have to pitch something so far down to achieve what you're after...I'd be inclined to see what you're working with...

It makes sense in how you can mirror the rest of the track because it wont change notes if you do a whole octave. Specific sound aswell innit.

The technique is made with formant shifting so Melodyne is really good, I use waves tunes, and the complex pro mode in ableton can allow you to do it but not quite as well. I think that most vocal tuning software can do it. If you down pitch a vocal in the complex pro mode you will see an option for formants and envelopes. Play around with those settings until you get something in tune. Sometimes you will hear two parts layered so you will formant shift a vocal in a lower pitch and then layer in the original pitch.

Formant shifting is different though. Not knocking the rest of the post.

JamesHanvey wrote:Been using ableton's transposition. Makes it sound way too muddy. Is there a better way? Looking for something like what's used in this (25 secs onwards)

I highly doubt he downtuned it as much as an octave... me myself when I want vocals to sound unnatural or I want some vocal chops (this actually pretty handy for chops) I find an acapella, samples etc. in different key than my track and then just tune it to fit in the key of track.... which means If you have acapella in the key of your instrumental and you want it to be pitched down, 12 semitones is a lot and mostly it won't sound good, so try to record/use acapella in different scale and then just pitch it up/down by for example 4 semitones... hope you understand and you find it helpful

Yeah but thats just like autotuned vocals innit

I think op is after how to have a deep voice in the track

like you know how asap rocky or madlib does it

sounds like if sb went for sth around -3-5 here and it sounds bit more stereo
an octave is like real deep you might need like shit hubb mentioned like maybe some amon tobin pc shit or what its called there was a pc made for granular and all this shit
or maybe a real good sorce like wav or high mp3 clean acapella

what i mean is you can get away with - 5 -7 often too especially with one shots
i loaded the tune into ableton and pitched it up 12 semitones and if thats the real voice of the singer lol hes a chipmunk

there's a prog called the amazing slow downer btwq..

it doesn't have the best algorithm or anything but it has a diff time editing features ( ?)
it sounds different from timestretching but it's cool to have that in combination with other pitch progs

I like to have a few differently 'stretched' versions of the same accapella or vocals and then instead of automating, just cut out different bits from each. For example cut the tail of a sound from the long version and 'glue' it to the short version.


oh and another vocal tip. If you have a nice pitched down vox and it's slightly unintelligable or unpronounced, you can take a version of the original un-pitched v and high pass very drastically so there's only the sybillance or the sound of the consonants left and then fade that in on a seperate track. it helps mostly with hiss sounds but it can help out a lot tbh..