Off Pitch Songs

[JimmyM]

Van Halen's first album is somewhere between A and A sharp. I read somewhere that Eddie did it to irritate people with perfect pitch.

He was unsuccessful if that's the case.

 

[BassyBill]

I too use Reaper for this, it's dead easy. I do it when my band's arrangement is in a different key to the original or when the original recording isn't at A440 for whatever reason. I render the new versions as mp3s with the word "SHIFTED" in the filename so I can find them easily. Some of my bandmates also find these shifted versions very useful for practice so I share them.

One of the most common reasons for me needing to do this is when we've changed the key of an original version with a male vocal to suit our girl singer. It's quite funny at times - Paul Simon sounds uncannily like our Debbie when he's pitch shifted up a perfect fourth.

Link Removed

I hope she doesn't see this, she'd kill me.

 

[Smurf_Byte]

I use the amazing slow downer app on ios to pitch correct. You can really fine tune and then export an mp3 to send to the rest of the band.

 

[s0c9]

I use a Windows program called "Transcribe!" to do the pitch shifting. It can show a frequency spectrum of the audio against an A440 scale so it's not too hard to fine tune the pitch. It can't save to MP3 but it's easy enough to save to WAV and use some other program to encode it to MP3.

I think you have plenty of company. Like you, I'm a Transcribe fan. Lots of older recordings aren't standard pitch and Transcribe allows you to tune the recording easily and without your bass. Key shifts (semi-tones) are handy too. I use the octave feature to either raise the bass line to hear it better or lower a horn line to make it sound more like a bass. Isn't software great?

+1000 !!!!!!!
Been using Transcribe for years... it has some limitations, but is by far the best practice tool I have found.
I have my transcribe folder set up by band, so if one band plays the same song in a different key, each transcribe file is saved with the appropriate key and set up when loaded. The audio file (one of the supported formats) remains in a single location. This is especially useful for church where the WL often changes week to week along with the key change of the song. I put the key in the transcribe file name, leaving the original mp3 untouched.
Beats down/up tuning an mp3 and saving multiple copies in multiple keys.

Also supports section, tempo and other markers so one can break up and label song segments. For learning, one can slow a selected area down to any rate from 10% to 100% and loop it.
Awesome product!

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with SevenString (Transcribe owner) in any manner other than being a licensed owner.