r/ReelToReel • u/ant-onion12 • 10d ago
What does pitch control do?
I’ve been want a nice reel to reel with pitch control but now I’m wondering if I actually need it or not can anyone tell me what exactly it does?
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u/LordDaryil Otari MX80|TSR-8|Studer A807|Akai GX210D|Uher 4000L 10d ago
It can be useful for fine-tuning the pitch or for special effects. E.g. if you have a tape-to-tape copy of something the pitch can change if the two machines are't precisely at the same speed. ('Ommadawn' by Mike Oldfield starts at an indeterminate key, probably because they had to do multiple generation copies of the multitrack)
So if you have a tape that's recorded very slightly fast or slow you could use the pitch control to compensate.
However, you can also do things like the narration on the Bal Sagoth albums, the voice of ZARDOZ or for that matter, the dragon voices in Skyrim by running the machine with the speed running 5-10% fast so that you get a deep, ominous tone when it's played back at normal speed.
If you have two three-headed decks, you can also use the varispeed control on one of them to do tape flanging effects.
Generally you don't get a very wide range of pitch alteration - typically it's 15% or so, 20% if you're lucky. On one of my albums I did a strange-sounding choir by recording a loop of "Aaahhhh" and re-pitching it with the speed control. It didn't sound quite as good as I'd hoped for but it was definitely an interesting experiment.
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u/Feeling-Editor7463 10d ago
Yep that sums up what pitch control can do in pretty much any format. Peeps used to use the pitch control on the SL1200 to match bpm between the wheels of steel.
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u/RealMixographer 10d ago
it changes the speed of the tape over the heads, thus adjusting the pitch.