Is it OK to slow a song down after it's finished? Then release it?

[mitchiemasha]

I once heard some make music at much slower tempos and then speed it up, because that's not destructive like pitching down is.

So you could compose at a much lower BPM and then decide later any higher BPM.

Are you on about TS or Vinyl/Tape style. If 1 direction is destructive so is the other.

It's far easier to remove samples (speed up) than to generate new samples (speed down). Additionally a higher speed will mask imperfections, because there will be other stuff competing for your attention in a full mix. One couldn't necessarily tell that some track was for example not even in rhythm, if there's enough stuff going on top of it.

I've had a quite a few friends come to me to make songs into rave tracks, 165-175 bpm, usually when speeding them up, using TS (to not have the chipmunk effect), the first issue you get is, the kick losses it's transient on every so many kicks, due to where the algorithm is splicing the audio and overlapping it. Transient information is lost through out on many sounds but usually, replacing the kick with some careful sidechain was enough to keep them happy.

That's why i asked "Are you on about TS or Vinyl/Tape style"

[soundmodel]

Maybe the used algorithm matters. The algorithms I've had seem to treat transients such as kicks and snares as such that they're mostly preserved while other parts can be sliced or mixed more. So the algorithm could e.g. consider a cross-fade between the bass drum and what follows, rather than slicing the bass drum's tail. This is quite logical, because these elements are crucial for e.g. rhythm perception.

I don't have anything to try it atm, but I remember that in e.g. Reason the pitch shifting tool specifically has the ability to "snap on transients". Modifying the markers will alter the rhythm, but with some smart logic in how to move the markers, one can retain individual sounds better, while speeding up.

Possibly, if you wanted to be really perfectionist, then you'd edit the whole song manually using such markers:

https://musictech.com/tutorials/reason-power-4/

Still, speeding up is far more forgiving than attempting to stretch sounds, because when stretching you need to figure out how to add what's not there. Speeding up is often certainly not causing more artifacts, and you can verify this e.g. by comparing up and down in e.g. Kontakt 5.

[mitchiemasha]

Maybe the used algorithm matters.

Elastique pro!

Yes, if we chop the hits then speed up the bpm, with the chops locked to grid, now we only lose the tails... I believe some daws have extra algorithms that work more in this way and in Cubase, there are functions that will automatically splice the loop for you, then when we speed it up, it would behave more like that algorithm. I don't really class that as time stretch though (well time shrink) as it's just a faster way of cutting up all the hits manually, locking to grid hit points, and speeding it up... where only the tails would now be underneath the next audio part.

[mitchiemasha]

Here's the preview link for the track. Possibly still a bit too fast regardless to the other issues. Full version should be live soon. Do let me know your thoughts, especially on the pacing.

https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/mitch ... fter-storm