Mellotronists

> From: jeffc@...
   > Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2006 13:59:08 -0400 (EDT)
   > 
   > it goes without saying, but i'll say it anyway: this does NOT
   > mean killing off the old recordings - just making an alternative
   > "clean" version available.

Well gee, if you're not gonna kill off the old recordings, where's the
drawa?  :-)

   > i recommend using the engineer responsible for a certain CHER
   > track from a couple years back.

I'll claim that the They Might Be Giants' song "Bastard Wants to Hit
Me" is a far more creative and musical use of pitch correction than
that annoying Cher song.  (Check it out under www.tmbg.com, under the
venue songs streaming videos.  The animation on that video is also
pretty amazing.)

   > but seriously, just how would you be doing this?

Either adjust the playback speed digitally or go old school and have a
variable frequency oscillator (VFO) drive the motor of the playback
tape machine.

The phrase "pitch shifting" refers to changing the pitch of an audio
signal without changing the tempo or speed.  To do this you need to
take time slices of the input signal, speed up or slow down each time
slice, and then concatentate the slices back, either throwing away the
extra pieces when pitching down or repeating some bits for pitching
up.  This is generally a digital operation, although the pitch
shifting used in Zappa's "The Purple Lagoon" is probably an analog
equivalent with BBD chips, and before that there was a mechanical
method of mounting several tape heads mounted on a spinning drum.
Either way, concatenting the time slices mucks up the sound quality,
so you don't want to use "pitch shifting" on Mellotron sounds.

  -- Don

-- 
Don Tillman
Palo Alto, California
don@...
http://www.till.com