Acid Studio pitch shift to Alphabetical notes instead of tone number

dennis-ninetynine wrote on 12/21/2021, 2:49 PM

Hello all.

I wonder if I can make an instrument note I am drawing to Acid Music Studio Software (Version 11, 64-bit) and it is in C (not necessarily octave 0, but somewhere in the middle) to be able to press [+] or [ - ] and change the semitones while displaying the alphabetical notes CDEFGAB instead of the pitch shift semitones number 0.000.

E.g.: My one-shot sound is in C, I press [+], it becomes C#, I press [+] again, becomes D. It is C, I press [ - ] it becomes B then again [ - ] and becomes A#.

It has happened accidently some times in the past, while I was changing the pitch to the one shot notes, ACID was estimating the note of the initial sound and then it changed as a letter while pressing [+] and [ - ]. I do not know if the wav file should have any extra information about that.

Comments

sheppo wrote on 12/22/2021, 8:38 AM

Great question, and I actually didn't think this was possible. But you're correct, you have seen this in the past. I had not.

For Acid to do this it needs to know the root note of the clip, which it is not possible to set on audio one shots, or midi clips.

  • Right click on a clip, select properties
  • Set the Acid Type to Loop or Beat Mapped
  • Under Clip properties, select the Stretch tab
  • Set the Initial Root note to a relevant note

Now when pitch shifting the clip you'll see by how much you're pitch shifting it, and what the new note would be.

dennis-ninetynine wrote on 12/22/2021, 2:23 PM

Thanks, Sheppo!
You are absolutely right, this is where I was seeing the alphabetical music notes on the sheet. Unfortunately, I am losing the one-shot quality of my one-shot instrument and gets stretched, so I am not going to follow this. Also, I tried it in a few sounds and although the sound is in C and I set root note to C, the ups and downs are not correct, so probably the estimation is not that effective.
So I will continue with my own mapping of musical notes:
C: -12, C#: -11, D: -10, D#: -9, E: -8, F: -7, F#: -6, G: -5, G#: -4, A: -3, A#: -2, B: -1, C: 0, C#: +1, D: +2, D#: +3, : E: +4, F: +5, F#: +6, G: +7, G#: +8, A: +9, A#: +10, B: +11, C: +12

sheppo wrote on 12/22/2021, 5:14 PM

hrmm.. It might be the way Acid is note pitching and slicing the loop up that makes re-pitching sound like it's not hitting the right pitch. Essentially it offers kinda like granular resampling, but with very course grains. So, this could make the playback of certain types of tonal instruments not pitch perfect. It's the same with a beatmapped clip, although beatmapping uses a different method of re-pitching, and often also doesn't sound great great for tonal notes. Normally I'd suggest not re-pitching a sample like this, you just want to play it different speeds... higher notes play faster, for example.

To do that you really want to use a sampler and drive it with midi.

When I'm using Ableton I do this a similar way, since individually plugging in note changes in to audio clips there is also time consuming and hard to see what's going on, just like with Acid. There's also no way to easily do chords, or arpeggiated sections. In Ableton there's the built in Sampler device. In Acid land Magix ship the Vita sampler, which should allow you to work in this way, just for whatever reason I don't have it installed right now. Another third party solution that works in Acid that i'm particularly fond of is Redux by renoise.

Hope that helps.. :)