latency and pitch shifters.

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how do you improve latency for pitch shifters in reaper?. my effects seem ok but the pitch shifters are too far out. Im 24bit, 512 and set to the highest audio thread priority on the asio settings.Also 44100  256. interface is steinberg ur22 mk ll.
Im using rea pitch and pitch down shifter down an octave .
Any help or tips much appreciated. 
ps i notice i do not have   request sample rate or request block size ticked. Does this matter? many thanks 

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Comments

  • flying_pieflying_pie Frets: 1806
    Pitch shifters will have latency with that much shift (I'm assuming you're going for fake bass effect rather than a blended effect). If it's for playing in real time then there's probably not much you can do. 

    If it's for recording then one option would be to record without the effect then render the pitch shifted track to a stem. You can then move the stem to line it up in time. 
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  • JAYJOJAYJO Frets: 1526
    Cheers Mate for your reply.
    What ive done is add the fx to a track and unticked them ie rea pitch, bass amp etc . (adjusted settings to suit previously) . Then when i have recorded the bass (using a strat guitar) i tick the fx  on the track and tweak etc. Is this a correct way to do it? 
    what is a stem? 
    I am currently working through the Kenny Gioia reaper tutorial vids but yet to learn about a stem. I will leave the latency issue alone as you say its unavoidable.


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  • RolandRoland Frets: 8590
    Pitch shifters will have latency with that much shift (I'm assuming you're going for fake bass effect rather than a blended effect). If it's for playing in real time then there's probably not much you can do. 
    There is one thing you can do, but I don’t know whether it’s possible with Reaper. With an Axe-FX you can use an ADSR in parallel with the main signal. The ADSR is set to let through the initial spike of a note, say 100ms, and then kill it. You have to fine tune the ADSR peak volume and duration. What it does is let’s through the pick attack, with virtually no latency, to cover the delay whilst Detune analyses the note.
    Tree recycler, and guitarist with  https://www.undercoversband.com/.
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  • flying_pieflying_pie Frets: 1806
    JAYJO said:
    Cheers Mate for your reply.
    What ive done is add the fx to a track and unticked them ie rea pitch, bass amp etc . (adjusted settings to suit previously) . Then when i have recorded the bass (using a strat guitar) i tick the fx  on the track and tweak etc. Is this a correct way to do it? 
    what is a stem? 
    I am currently working through the Kenny Gioia reaper tutorial vids but yet to learn about a stem. I will leave the latency issue alone as you say its unavoidable.


    A stem is basically the end result of all your effects for a track processed into a new track. You can think of the regular track being like a photoshop file with all manner of non destructive edits and layers, and the stem as being a jpeg of those edits. You can still add new effects in a stem but you can't undo the previous effects. The original track will usually still be there but muted so you could go back to it. If you wanted to try it then you'd be best to pitch shift the dry signal, render to stem and then do all your further edits on the stem. 

    So if there's a constant latency you can render the track into a new stem and manually shift it so that the latency is accounted for. You can then do further edits on the new stem. If the latency varies from note to note then you'd have a lot of work to do to get everything to line up and it wouldn't be worth it.

    I'm not a big enough authority on Reaper to say it's totally unavoidable but I think you would have problems because it's down to the analysis of the note in the software rather than the interface. It's also an issue with pitch shift pedals - as the intervals get bigger the latency increases because there's more work to be done. 

    Roland's suggestion of adding a short bit of the dry signal would mask the delay that but I don't know if that can be done in Reaper. 
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  • JAYJOJAYJO Frets: 1526
    Thanks for your help much appreciate your time and effort. I will have a look at stems and refer back to this post Thank You.
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  • wave100wave100 Frets: 150
    I take it you are on Windows? It looks like your buffer settings are quite high - can you bring them down at all? That would reduce your latency considerably. There is an inverse relationship between latency and the amount of work your processor has to do (ie how many plugins you are running) so it might help to "freeze" tracks which have a lot of plugins to save CPU cycles. Also, check Robin Vincent's Molten Music channel on youtube for some advice on optimising PCs for music.  He specifically talks about Surface machines but you can generalise this to most PCs, especially laptops. 
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  • flying_pieflying_pie Frets: 1806
    JAYJO said:
    Thanks for your help much appreciate your time and effort. I will have a look at stems and refer back to this post Thank You.
    It's useful to learn how stems work as well as how to freeze tracks.

    But don't spend to much time on it - If you're trying to pitch shift a guitar to get it to sound like a real bass guitar then it won't. It'll sound rubbish. It'll be much better to use a real bass (even the shittiest cheapest one) or a vst bass plugin and midi. 
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  • JAYJOJAYJO Frets: 1526
    wave100 said:
    I take it you are on Windows? It looks like your buffer settings are quite high - can you bring them down at all? That would reduce your latency considerably. There is an inverse relationship between latency and the amount of work your processor has to do (ie how many plugins you are running) so it might help to "freeze" tracks which have a lot of plugins to save CPU cycles. Also, check Robin Vincent's Molten Music channel on youtube for some advice on optimising PCs for music.  He specifically talks about Surface machines but you can generalise this to most PCs, especially laptops. 
    Thanks for the channel recommendation i've watched it over twice. I've also reduced buffer to 256 from 512 for now . as he says experiment. 
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  • JAYJOJAYJO Frets: 1526
    JAYJO said:
    Thanks for your help much appreciate your time and effort. I will have a look at stems and refer back to this post Thank You.
    It's useful to learn how stems work as well as how to freeze tracks.

    But don't spend to much time on it - If you're trying to pitch shift a guitar to get it to sound like a real bass guitar then it won't. It'll sound rubbish. It'll be much better to use a real bass (even the shittiest cheapest one) or a vst bass plugin and midi. 
    Thanks mate. im not sure on using midi something else i dont now enough about.. I think a bass guitar will have to be the solution eventually as i just want to plug and play. cheers
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  • bingefellerbingefeller Frets: 5723

    JAYJO said:
    JAYJO said:
    Thanks for your help much appreciate your time and effort. I will have a look at stems and refer back to this post Thank You.
    It's useful to learn how stems work as well as how to freeze tracks.

    But don't spend to much time on it - If you're trying to pitch shift a guitar to get it to sound like a real bass guitar then it won't. It'll sound rubbish. It'll be much better to use a real bass (even the shittiest cheapest one) or a vst bass plugin and midi. 
    Thanks mate. im not sure on using midi something else i dont now enough about.. I think a bass guitar will have to be the solution eventually as i just want to plug and play. cheers

    I don't really know  much about midi either but I  have a trick I use for making a midi bass line, although it only works with midi drums.

    - Make a new midi bass instrument

    - Copy and paste your midi drum pattern on to the midi bass track.

    - Delete the notes that triggered the high hats / cymbals etc on the drum track, leaving only the kick and snare.

    - bring the kick and snare pattern on to one single "line" on the midi track and then move it until it matches up with the root note of whatever chord you're playing over. 

    It's not the best method, but at least you will have some low end on your track and it's better than having a bass playing constant 8th or 16th notes on every track. 

    I use this technique on all my ROTM entries. 

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  • thecolourboxthecolourbox Frets: 9654
    JAYJO said:
    JAYJO said:
    Thanks for your help much appreciate your time and effort. I will have a look at stems and refer back to this post Thank You.
    It's useful to learn how stems work as well as how to freeze tracks.

    But don't spend to much time on it - If you're trying to pitch shift a guitar to get it to sound like a real bass guitar then it won't. It'll sound rubbish. It'll be much better to use a real bass (even the shittiest cheapest one) or a vst bass plugin and midi. 
    Thanks mate. im not sure on using midi something else i dont now enough about.. I think a bass guitar will have to be the solution eventually as i just want to plug and play. cheers

    I don't know much about fixing stuff up for your original question, but please don't worry about not knowing enough about all of this stuff - it's a steep learning curve and even folks that know roughly what they are doing are always learning. That's why you ask here for people's help, no need to feel silly for having to ask mate. It's a bloody minefield but you're in the right place to get the help!

    What you could do is get the cheapest mono octave down pedal you can find, and play through that into the interface? Would reduce the processing work the computer is having to do


    Please note my communication is not very good, so please be patient with me
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  • bingefellerbingefeller Frets: 5723
    JAYJO said:
    JAYJO said:
    Thanks for your help much appreciate your time and effort. I will have a look at stems and refer back to this post Thank You.
    It's useful to learn how stems work as well as how to freeze tracks.

    But don't spend to much time on it - If you're trying to pitch shift a guitar to get it to sound like a real bass guitar then it won't. It'll sound rubbish. It'll be much better to use a real bass (even the shittiest cheapest one) or a vst bass plugin and midi. 
    Thanks mate. im not sure on using midi something else i dont now enough about.. I think a bass guitar will have to be the solution eventually as i just want to plug and play. cheers

    I don't know much about fixing stuff up for your original question, but please don't worry about not knowing enough about all of this stuff - it's a steep learning curve and even folks that know roughly what they are doing are always learning. That's why you ask here for people's help, no need to feel silly for having to ask mate. It's a bloody minefield but you're in the right place to get the help!

    What you could do is get the cheapest mono octave down pedal you can find, and play through that into the interface? Would reduce the processing work the computer is having to do



    Some octave pedals aren't great at tracking either, especially the cheaper ones.  The Boss OC-3 is good as is the EHX Pitchfork from my experience.  Digitech Drop is king of them all IMO.
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  • flying_pieflying_pie Frets: 1806
    edited May 2018
    That's an interesting technique @bingefeller ;;;;;

    I can see how it could help. 

    Re: pitch shift pedals - the cheap ones have bad latency at a full octave setting. Older Whammy pedals are dreadful at the full octave. I have a pitchfork which is much better but still wouldn't use it for a bass effect as the latency is noticeable at larger intervals. I haven't tried the digitech drop but I'd expect a bit of latency too. EHX pog has amazing tracking at a full octave but you could get a decent second hand bass guitar for the same price as one of those 
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  • JAYJOJAYJO Frets: 1526

    JAYJO said:
    JAYJO said:
    Thanks for your help much appreciate your time and effort. I will have a look at stems and refer back to this post Thank You.
    It's useful to learn how stems work as well as how to freeze tracks.

    But don't spend to much time on it - If you're trying to pitch shift a guitar to get it to sound like a real bass guitar then it won't. It'll sound rubbish. It'll be much better to use a real bass (even the shittiest cheapest one) or a vst bass plugin and midi. 
    Thanks mate. im not sure on using midi something else i dont now enough about.. I think a bass guitar will have to be the solution eventually as i just want to plug and play. cheers

    I don't really know  much about midi either but I  have a trick I use for making a midi bass line, although it only works with midi drums.

    - Make a new midi bass instrument

    - Copy and paste your midi drum pattern on to the midi bass track.

    - Delete the notes that triggered the high hats / cymbals etc on the drum track, leaving only the kick and snare.

    - bring the kick and snare pattern on to one single "line" on the midi track and then move it until it matches up with the root note of whatever chord you're playing over. 

    It's not the best method, but at least you will have some low end on your track and it's better than having a bass playing constant 8th or 16th notes on every track. 

    I use this technique on all my ROTM entries. 

    Hi mate. Thanks for this ,i will have a look into doing this when i get a chance. 
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  • JAYJOJAYJO Frets: 1526

    JAYJO said:
    JAYJO said:
    Thanks for your help much appreciate your time and effort. I will have a look at stems and refer back to this post Thank You.
    It's useful to learn how stems work as well as how to freeze tracks.

    But don't spend to much time on it - If you're trying to pitch shift a guitar to get it to sound like a real bass guitar then it won't. It'll sound rubbish. It'll be much better to use a real bass (even the shittiest cheapest one) or a vst bass plugin and midi. 
    Thanks mate. im not sure on using midi something else i dont now enough about.. I think a bass guitar will have to be the solution eventually as i just want to plug and play. cheers

    I don't know much about fixing stuff up for your original question, but please don't worry about not knowing enough about all of this stuff - it's a steep learning curve and even folks that know roughly what they are doing are always learning. That's why you ask here for people's help, no need to feel silly for having to ask mate. It's a bloody minefield but you're in the right place to get the help!

    What you could do is get the cheapest mono octave down pedal you can find, and play through that into the interface? Would reduce the processing work the computer is having to do


    Thanks for your kind words mate, much appreciate all the help from here. 
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