This week, I’m going to take a single Pattern Sequence being played back by a hardware synth and turn it into a thick, rich, detuned line. To do that, I’m going to explore Varispeed.
Think of Varispeed as being like an old-school tape machine where the relationship between Pitch and Speed means that as Speed drops, Pitch falls too and, conversely, as Pitch rises, so Speed increases. Varispeed lets us create a percentage offset from the Tempo of our project and, due to the fixed relationship between Speed and Pitch, that means that Pitch will be affected by that percentage offset too. In this episode, I’ll show you how capturing the sound of a hardware synth with Varispeed offsets, means that when Varispeed is reset to the host tempo, the Pitch implications allow for interesting, detuned layers.
00:00 Intro and Track playback
00:45 Recording hardware synth sequence
02:16 Setting up Varispeed
03:04 What is Varispeed?
05:13 Varispeed and Pitch
06:06 What could we do with Varispeed?
06:42 Second capture with -3% Varispeed
09:05 Third capture with +2% Varispeed
10:36 Further Varispeed offset
11:20 Panning and Filtering each audio file
12:23 Adding synth lines to Track
14:00 Summary