Here's the pitch!

[Primitive]

I work in radio in Canada, recently visited Detroit and was stunned by the number of stations speeding up the pitch of songs. Surfing the web tonight, I turned on Alice from Denver, and they do it too.

My question is why??? Why would you purposely do something to alter the music, and create another reason for radio to be undesirable to the listener? God knows our 10 or 12 minutes of commercials will do a good enough job of that.

I know "Say It Right" by Nelly Furtado well enough to know when it has been sped up. Aren't we just pissing off our listeners by doing this? When I hear songs at the wrong speed, I immediately shut the station off. True music fans must notice when we do this.

 

[jcolletta275]

It's an old trick used to make the listeners think the competition sounds "slower" and more dull.

In all honesty, I like my music pitched up about 1.5% to just sound a tad brighter than the competition. Most stations that pitch their music up, however, do it at about 3%... which, to me, sounds absolutely ridiculous. The truth of the matter, however, is that most listeners really don't care about that. It doesn't turn them off. It's more the overabundance of commercials and lame programming you mention that turns listeners away.

That's not to say listeners don't notice the music has been pitched up. They know. But they really, truly, don't care, and that's one of the very, very few things they don't care about when it comes to programming.

EDIT: I just realized you mentioned you were in Detroit... were you listening to WKQI? They pitch their music up 4%! They're way over the top!

 

[PirateRadio]

Like Josh C said, ít's an old trick to make the listener think the other stations are slower and dull. But here in The Netherlands is serves (served) another point.

Since the stations are (were) paying royalties by the second, the quicker the song goes, the less they have to pay.

I don't know if it still works that way, but it used to work that way in the past.

 

[jcolletta275]

Huh! That's a new one by me! Smart, though!

 

[ricoontheradio]

Like Josh C said, ít's an old trick to make the listener think the other stations are slower and dull. But here in The Netherlands is serves (served) another point.

Since the stations are (were) paying royalties by the second, the quicker the song goes, the less they have to pay.

I don't know if it still works that way, but it used to work that way in the past.

That seems it'd even out. Those few seconds you save get made up for when you end up playing an additional song. Plus, there are 168 hours in a week regardless of the speed of a song, so you end up playing the same amount of music. Seems like a silly philosophy, unless I'm missing something.

 

[Primitive]

EDIT: I just realized you mentioned you were in Detroit... were you listening to WKQI? They pitch their music up 4%! They're way over the top!

You've got it! That's the station. WDVD seemed to do it as well.

 

[Robert Bass]

Show of hands from those who thought this was going to be a thread about Baseball. :-[

Where I work, we not only leave the pitch alone, we use far less compression than almost everyone else in this market.

Having said that, a listener once claimed we were speeding the songs up, and challenged us to compare our source material against the CD version in a high quality CD player.

Some people... :

R

 

[Robert Bass]

If your competitor pushes the speed on their hits and you don't, your listeners will start sending you Geritol.

Until they buy their own copy of the song and realize their copy is slower. Afterwords, they'll complain to the stations. I am not an advocate of playing songs faster. It's bad enough most stations over-compress the audio to begin with...

R

 

[SFM-Ptgal]

How's the pitch change done today? Knowing that songs are ripped directly to a server/database how does the automation handle it? Are the songs pre-processed giving the desired pitch b4 automation insertion?

How about stations that used Russco or QRK like turntables... knowing that they hadn't a pitch change device could stitions that owned them had pitch to their music?

Pedro

 

[Robert Bass]

How's the pitch change done today? Knowing that songs are ripped directly to a server/database how does the automation handle it? Are the songs pre-processed giving the desired pitch b4 automation insertion?

To my knowledge, there are at least two methods:

1. Buy a CD player with pitch control, and record the playback as a .wav file.

2. Rip the songs to the hard drive, then open the files via Adobe Audition and use the stretch feature.

R

 

[davideduardo]

How about stations that used Russco or QRK like turntables... knowing that they hadn't a pitch change device could stitions that owned them had pitch to their music?

In the 70's, this was done with an add-on that changed the line cycle rate of the hysterisis-synchronous motors so that they ran a bit faster. Then we carted the music from the turntables.

 

[davideduardo]

Until they buy their own copy of the song and realize their copy is slower. Afterwords, they'll complain to the stations. I am not an advocate of playing songs faster. It's bad enough most stations over-compress the audio to begin with...

I ran speeded up songs on an AC with a significant share for about 5 years, and never had a compalint. Then on another format did the same thing as well as editing nearly every song for length and got no complaints, either. We did, however, get a 33.5 in one ratings book.

 

[ilistentotheradio]

How's the pitch change done today?

It's done by my automation system.

 

[SFM-Ptgal]

I know that the USA radio market is quite agressive and some simple features like had pich to a song might help on the ratings. What if all the stations with the same format decide to do the same? How to differentiate? Had more pitch?

I know that's not the way but I just wanna point that fortunately there's no need for that on my country although on my early days I saw a jock add 3% pitch on the sl1200 for "fun", its was a small local station. On major national networks that's not used and was never used, not even on the top local ones. I consider adding pitch to the station musics a silly issue... Sooner or later it will be left away even in the USA...

 

[hotdogsrule]

Most automation systems, if maybe not all, have the ability to pitch music and other elements separately.

There are two reasons its generally done:
1.) To make the tempo of the station seem a bit brighter
2.) The one I haven't heard anyone mention on here - is that you can generally fit an extra song in per hour if its pitched at about 3% to attempt to create the illusion of more music.

As a programmer, I have done it on every CHR I've programmed but generally don't do it at rock.

 

[Countrykev]

Yep. We just switched to Scott Studios and "pitching" or "hyping" the songs was one of the first things we did. Scott will let you set globally on the music catagory to pitch the music, without making the singers sound like chimpmunks. Prophet can do something similar.

 

[LinoNYC]

How's the pitch change done today? Knowing that songs are ripped directly to a server/database how does the automation handle it? Are the songs pre-processed giving the desired pitch b4 automation insertion?

How about stations that used Russco or QRK like turntables... knowing that they hadn't a pitch change device could stitions that owned them had pitch to their music?

Pedro

I don't work in radio but I understand that it is possible to change speed without changing pitch using features in the popular automation systems. Insideous.

For people who torture their music at home there are cheap/free options.

If you have Nero cd burning software, search for "wave editor" it has both pitch and tempo.

For free there is Audacy:http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ -a .wav editor with with alot of functions.

Years ago, if you didn't have a variable speed turntable there were several methods.

Some companies offered replacement motor pulleys for popular studio turntables, I suspect these were simply 50hz but they sure did speed things up.

Another, much more flexible method was to connect an audio oscillator to an industrial amplifier with 115 volt output such as those made by Bogen, Rauland-Borg, Vickers or RCA.

This was expensive but worked very well and could continuosly vary pitch and be used on motors in professional tape transports as well.

While in collage in the late 1970's I worked for a company named Martin Audio which rented sound systems for theater but also had a manufacturing wing that produced a device called "Varispeed" It cost about $500 took two rack spaces and had continuous and pre-set speed control along with a frequency meter. I had one of these and although it was intended for use with Ampex or Scully tape machines it was easy to attach a standard outlet and connect any syncron-motor turntable.

It's often funny to read of the expense and trouble stations went to for something that I and friends often resented.

A little uptempo is "OK" most however were heavy handed.

Lino

 

[amfmsw]

It must be that new math, hotdog. 3% of 60 minutes is 1.8 minutes. Were you playing "Stay" by Maurice Williams & The Zodiacs? 1:32.
Plus, you would also have to be commercial, liner, and jingle free with talking only over fades and intros.

 

[PTBoardOp94]

Plus, you would also have to be commercial, liner, and jingle free with talking only over fades and intros.

Or you could make your liner guy sound nice and airy...pitch him up 6%

 

[busyradioguy]

Plus, you would also have to be commercial, liner, and jingle free with talking only over fades and intros.

Or you could make your liner guy sound nice and airy...pitch him up 6%

OUCH!!!!! ROFL! ;D

There is one automation system I know of, that can speed up the pitch via the CD Jukebox player from Sony. I think that model was the CDK3600, or something along those lines.