"Jim Lesurf" wrote in message
...
I fear we're out of luck. This seems now to be an 'effect' so far as the
pop music biz is concerned. If they think it 'sells' they just go on using
it. The rest of us just have to avoid it if we find it idiotic or
irritating.

Jim


Yes indeed. The listening public are fickle, and vote with
their wallets, and are always interested in something new.
Remember rototoms? !!! Fortunately the fad passed.
But it is still fun to use them (sparingly:-) now and again.

But it seems to me Brian is talking about two different things:
pitch correction and pitch shifting. Pitch correction is these days
widely used, and if implemented well, I would say that 95% of
the public do not even know it has been used on a track, as they
have no "precorrected" reference to go by.

Pitch shifting has been with us a long time. Back in the day,
analogue multitrack recorders had synchronous motors, and no
varispeed. But most studios had a box by which one could vary
the supply frerquency and thus the speed of the capstan motor.
You could double track say a guitar solo with slightly shifted
pitch, and pan the two tracks to opposite sides - nice effect, and
set up in a very short time. You could of course retune the guitar
by say 25cents, but that takes a lot longer.


In 1974 the Eventide Corporation brought out the first commercially
available digital audio effects device, the "Harmonizer" which was a
digital delay and pitch shifter. The studio as which I worked bought
half a dozen, despite their price tag of USD 3k - that was a *lot* of
money in 1974!

It was magic. You could turn a Guild six string guitar into a twelve
string the likes of which had never been heard before - spread right
across the soundstage in a second.

But like all audio effects, these things need to be used with taste
and subtlety.

Iain