Changing Key or Pitch of Music With Audacity Audio Editor

Audacity can be used for pitch or key change, but it introduces distortion or undesirable artifacts into a song. As an alternative, Song Surgoen provides distortion free audio for key or pitch change. For more information go to
http://www.songsurgeon.com/page/audac.... Download a 4-hour free demo.

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Closed Caption:

the program that i have opened on my
screen is called audacity and it is a
fairly widely used audio editor and one
of the reasons that it is widely used is
because it's free so the price is
certainly right and it's fair to say
that it does have a fairly broad array
of features and it is also easy to use
so all those things make it a pretty
decent little program i want to focus
today on using it though for changing
the pitch of a song because a lot of
people do use it for that and I want to
discuss with you a couple of things
about it
meaning audacity and using it for
changing the pitch of the song and then
we will also talk about an alternative
way in which you can accomplish this
so first thing I'm going to do is just
arbitrarily selected section of the song
here that we might want to change the
pitch on going to go to the effects
button open it up and when you go to
change pitch one of the first things you
can see here is that it is using a
technology called soundTouch now sound
touches a fairly old technology and it
is one that was created to change the
pitch of the spoken word it was not
created to deal with all the
complexities of music so it does not
work that well and proof of the pudding
is that on some songs when you change it
you can hear distortion or artifacts in
just small changes we're talking about
not semi tones which it would be a
typical half step change in music but
incense which one one-hundredth of a
semi tone so what I want to do then is
to play this song that we have open
right now play just a bit of it we're
going to play it in the normal pitch and
i have uploaded right now so let's take
a quick listen for let's say 10 seconds
in the normal pitch
yeah
okay so there we go hit sounds fairly
robust and it sounds fine now let's go
ahead and go back to change pitch let's
change it by one half step or a semi
tone and let's click OK one thing that I
want to point out what you saw flash on
the screen was the program processing
the change in pitch and what that means
here is that you cannot do this
real-time as it's playing you have to
select an area and then you have to
allow it to modify that area before you
can actually play it back and that's
important because it's very useful to be
able to do it real time but that being
said let's go ahead now and listen to
this again and remember i changed it a
half a step and let's see if you can
hear the difference because i think
you're going to see it's quite
pronounced
alright what you hear there is a wobble
are quite a bit of artifact and in fact
if you change this only a few cents
you'll hear something similar so with
organ music as an example here the pits
change introduces a lot of artifacts in
a hurry and it doesn't work that well
now certainly there are other types of
music whether it's rock music or jazz
music in which you might be able to
change the pitch more effectively but
the point is that it does introduce
artifacts because it was not created to
process music or to process songs the
soundTouch library that's used for pitch
change was made for the spoken word in
the spoken word only
okay i have a program called song
surgeon now loaded on my screen and I
have the same song the same organ tune
which is called a mighty fortress and
we're going to go ahead and now play it
back so you can listen to it and we were
approximately at the 15-second . in the
other song or 13 here so we're close
it's not quite the same but let's take a
quick listen
ok so there you have it now let's go
back again again setting it at
approximately the same place now let's
change it by half step and here we're
going to go ahead and change it by a
half step we've done that and now let's
listen again
ok so what you can hear is that pre in
the post sound the same except for the
half step change in pitch or in key
there is no distortion here so it gives
you a much much better quality pitch
change in what you can get using
audacity and if you're a performer you
want to change the key of the song a
half a step
you want to use that recording audacity
just probably won't cut it for you
whereas this particular application can
what I'd recommend that you do is go to
the song surgeon website where you can
download a fully functional for our free
trial or demo and that's certainly more
than enough time that if you have just a
single song or a couple of songs that
you need to change the pitch on that you
can do that and if you're looking for
something to use permanently that you're
going to be using on a regular basis you
might consider buying it
I'll put the website address up here on
the screen here at the end of this video
and thank you for watching thanks