How to convert songs to 440 A?

[guy n. cognito]

My last post was a little misleading. I meant that, say if a song is in E, I don't know if it's between Eb - E or E - E#. Maybe it's not a perfect quarter tone between those notes, so I don't know if I'm exactly on a note in the 440 A scale. See what I mean?

You'll have to use your ears to tell when you've gotten it right.

 

[Rockin Mike]

Bearing in mind the OPs original question, it's not so much the key that's wanted as how to deal with the small deviation from the standard tuning.

Audacity can do this. It's not a particularly slick tool for the purpose.

The slickest way to do this, provided your ears can tell you how much out of tune you are, is to use either a standalone piece of hardware like a Korg Pandora PX4B (very reaonably priced 2nd hand on ebay last time I looked) and use the Aux Pitch function to adjust the song to the tuning of your bass. The pandora will go from in tune to (say) +1 semitone in 5 steps, so it will probably get close enough to sound in tune when you play along.

You'll probably get closer matching if you can find a software tool for the same thing. I use 'Vox' on the mac. I don't have experience with the others mentioned.

To do it with Audacity, first, import your song into audacity. Find a bit a of the song where there's one clear note sounding. Select that then choose Analyze, then Plot Spectrum. Then (and this bit is important) Choose Algorithm: spectrum, Size: 8192, Function: Rectangular window, Axis: Log frequency. And then put your cursor over the leftmost high spike in the graph. under the graph you should now see something like 'Peak 91 Hz (F#2) = -22.2 db' . (Ignore the similar bit of text that starts with the word cursor).

So the software has found your note(F#) and the exact frequency (91Hz). Now, you're set for adjusting the song. Finds the frequency F#2 should be from this chart http://www.guitarpitchshifter.com/fig_2_1.png. We want our note to be 92.5 Hz. In Audacity, select the whole song, then from the menu, Effect, then Change Pitch. In 'frequency from' fill in the pitch from the song (91) and in 'frequency to' fill in the pitch you want (92.5) and hit OK. Now export the song as an MP3 and you can play along in tune.

Since Audacity's frequency analysis only gives frequencies in whole Hz, you get better accuracy by picking higher notes. And choose your sample carefully, you don't want to be frequency-analyzing the cymbals, or the bass drum,that won't tell you anything

So, you can do it in Audacity, but if you can do it by ear you'll be much better off.

There's more than one way to do it in audacity.
I do it like this:
1. open up a virtual keyboard in a browser for a pitch reference.
2. load the song in audacity
3. From the Effect menu, choose Change Pitch. In the change pitch dialog you can specify to go from some note up or down to some other note, or you can tell it to go + or - any percentage that you like. You can also tell it to go + or - any number of half-steps, or from some frequency (in Hz) to some other frequency. The frequency can be specified up to 1/1000 of a Hz.

4. Click preview and compare to the virtual keyboard
5. Adjust the dialog as needed until it sounds right.

Easy Peasy.

 

[LeeNunn]

I'll give another plug for Transcribe! I always tune my bass to A440. When I open an MP3 file in Transcribe, the first thing I do is tap a measure marker (letter m) at the beginning of each measure and let the software automatically add the other beat markers. The second thing I do is adjust the pitch if necessary. If it's old recording, it's just a matter of adjusting the cents control. I use my ear, but you can do it visually too. Sometimes it's not obvious whether I should adjust up or down, but the music gives hints. For example, open strings are dead give aways. Also, sometimes we play a tune in a key that's different from the original. In those cases, I use the semitone control to change the key. Then I save the Transcribe! file and I'm ready to go.

 

[eukatheude]

You can use pretty much any DAW to do it.