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Playing music pitched down
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| Tangil |
Just wondering if anyone here who DJs has had much success with playing tracks at a tempo that is a lot slower than the usual speed of the track, e.g. around 12% or more. After seeing guys like Andrew Weatherall play, I think they have to be playing a fair amount of their music fairly pitched down, only thing is that it sounds good. Often when I experiment with slowing things down it just sounds obviously slow and there's not enough going on in the tune when the elements are more spaced out.
Any thoughts on this? |
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| Sykonee |
| Quite a few jocks had plenty of success pitching their tracks down once punters started taking ketemine in mass doses. |
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| Woony |
| I can't talk about the stuff Weatherall plays but a lot of old techno sounds much better at -6 or -8. Around 2009/10 DJs like Ben Klock were playing a huge amount of pitched way down 90s techno around 128. Nowadays techno (at least here in berlin) has gotten much faster again to the point where you sometimes even hear people play them near their original speed. |
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| SYSTEM-J |
| 12% is pretty steep. Weatherall might pitch some tracks right down, but I don't think he would play much at -12. If you look at a lot of the records he plays, they're already at 100-115bpm. When you get down to that speed, a difference of 5bpm becomes 5%, so some heavy pitching can go on, but I've never known him pitch anything at -12 or close to it. |
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| JonDC |
| I often find myself pitching stuff up or down by up to 8%. 12% does seem quite excessive. I've never really put much thought into what dictates whether a tune can take it or not - it's just a case of trial and error |
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| Tangil |
| quote: | Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
12% is pretty steep. Weatherall might pitch some tracks right down, but I don't think he would play much at -12. If you look at a lot of the records he plays, they're already at 100-115bpm. When you get down to that speed, a difference of 5bpm becomes 5%, so some heavy pitching can go on, but I've never known him pitch anything at -12 or close to it. |
Yeah fair point - 12% is a lot, and would be noticeable. Not that I'd seen him do it, but I was querying whether he'd taken stuff from the 120bpm mark and slotted it in with slower stuff but obviously not. |
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| Tangil |
| quote: | Originally posted by Woony
I can't talk about the stuff Weatherall plays but a lot of old techno sounds much better at -6 or -8. Around 2009/10 DJs like Ben Klock were playing a huge amount of pitched way down 90s techno around 128. Nowadays techno (at least here in berlin) has gotten much faster again to the point where you sometimes even hear people play them near their original speed. |
Yeah -6 can sound great as long as any melodies can still be heard, which probably wouldn't be an issue for the stuff Klock plays. |
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| Paradox Lost |
It probably just sounds obviously slow because you're used to hearing your own music at its original tempo- I've heard plenty of music pitched hard in either direction that I had no idea was pitched until I went looking for the original track. That said, vocals are going to obviously sound Vaporwave levels of wonky at that percentage, but I've found the key lock in something like Traktor makes everything sound perfectly natural no matter how much you're pitching, and with none of the distortion you used experience when attempting to do the same on the old CDJ's.
But as far as mixing goes, if you're pitching down into the double digits you probably want to be layering multiple tracks over each other, as everything is just way too dragged out and spaced apart to let any one track play out in its entirety. I'm hugely found of the breathing room and groove you find in music that's produced in the low 100's and 110's, but it's not something you can replicate just by slowing down a much faster track. |
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| SYSTEM-J |
| quote: | Originally posted by Paradox Lost
...but I've found the key lock in something like Traktor makes everything sound perfectly natural no matter how much you're pitching, and with none of the distortion you used experience when attempting to do the same on the old CDJ's. |
If you pitch something down by more than 10% in Traktor, you still get that classic time-stretch stuttery artefact on drums in particular (so beloved of '90s drum 'n bass producers).
Techno is the most pitch-able genre, partly because the sounds are frequently very abstract and partly because it rarely has much in the way of tonality to begin with. |
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| SPANIARD |
All depends. Had a discussion with a friend not too long ago with how a lot of the Trance DJ's who have flirted with Full On Psy have usually pitched it down quite a bit (John Askew, Will Atkinson etc). Sounds totally off when they do. The tempo makes a lot of those tracks what they are IMO, they weren't designed to be psy moments in uplifting trance sets. The purpose was to have a 145 BPM track banged out at a particular moment at a psy festival.
On the other hand, Weatherall pulls it off greatly but keeping in mind that a lot of those tracks can be messed around with. Even his productions like the cut copy remix he did a few years back that Holden was whoring out. You can slow it down to something Andrew would play in his sets or speed it up to suit a prog DJ.
It's all about the original production to begin with and what it's limits are. I remember Hernan talked about in one of his compilations that the tracks on the downtempo side where totally edited in a studio rather than just slowing them down on a mixer. Brings up the interesting point of why some DJ's wouldn't just search out tracks already at that tempo which would probably sound better and more organic. |
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| wotyzoid |
| I don't give a personally, I'll play stuff at half time and I don't care if it sounds like because its fun. |
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