We have a winner for the prize of a Pitch-n-Tune Bundle With ElastiqueAAX, Elastique Pitch And Retune Plugins Worth generously donated by zplane. He is Menno Vroom, an audio designer from the Netherlands.

My name is Menno Vroom, audio designer for Radio 10 at Talpa Network.

Talpa is the largest Media Company in the Netherlands and is known worldwide as the creator of “The Voice of ...” TV shows. An audio designer is somebody who makes promos, jingles, commercials and creative comedy productions for radio stations and radio personalities. Like spoof-songs, phone-pranks, audio for on-air contest and editing ‘coming up’ montages.

The job has a wide variety of disciplines but mainly producing and editing commercials and promos. The latter is my favourite. I love making music collages, weaving famous hits like a tapestry by using the camelot system. Another favourite is creating humorous sketches and funny scenes for jingles and promos.

Pro Tools is my tool of the trade. When recording voice-overs I use a Neumann TLM 103 microphone, a Focusrite ISA 430 MK II Mic Pre Amp and a Distressor to add some analogue warmth. Last but not least, monitoring by a set of Genelec 1031A. 2020 will be the year the studio will get some professional room treatment.

In radio, many promo productions are music promos with lots of short fragments from the biggest hits. Bringing them together in a 30 seconds promo is complex job. By working with the Camelot system (circle of fifths) and keeping a steady rhythm makes it all work quite well. Most of the times these are a set of pre-selected songs and don’t match in tempo or key.

This is where the creative part starts, chaining song A to song B, to song C, to song D, to song E in a very short span of time. Preferably it starts with the slowest chorus working it’s way up to the fastest hook and preferably in a nice key progression. Top notch pitching and tuning software is essential. I need to stretch, crop, pitch shift and retune parts to make it fit and flow.

Zplane has developed outstanding pitch and retune software, it’s just the best on the market. Very musical and far fewer artefacts than the standard Pro Tools TC/E algorithm. Secondly, Retune by Zplane has sparked some great ideas for a new radio contest: The working title is “Put the song back in its original key” The radio DJ alters a big hit into a different key. Listeners have to put it back by going up or down the ladder of the musical scales.

Throughout December we offered the opportunity for over 30 people to win a prize of your choice from an amazing bundle of prizes that we pulled together from our generous partners, worth around £30,000.

Each day, we took a closer look at each of the prizes in turn. Today we are looking at the Pitch and Tune Bundle from Zplane worth $721.

What Is Included In The Pitch And Time Bundle?

The Pitch and Time Bundle from Zplane includes ElastiqueAAX, commonly accepted as the best timetretch product available today, Elastique Pitch V2, which offers the highest quality pitch shifting and time stretching and Retune, which offers an intuitive musical scale based interface for Zplane’s pitch shifting technology

ElastiqueAAX

élastiqueAAX is zplane’s time and pitch manipulation plugin for Pro Tools. It uses the  élastiquePro V3 time-stretching and pitch shifting engine which is integrated in numerous DAWs and satisfies millions of users around the world.  This ensures the highest, program independent time-stretching/pitch-shifting quality.

The plugin interface has been designed to allow quick and intuitive interaction with all parameters for maximum control. élastiqueAAX is an offline Audio Suite plugin, therefore allowing to apply time-stretching and pitch-shifting much faster than real-time.

élastiqueAAXtce is a stripped down version that only supports time-stretching as TC/E plugin in Pro Tools. You´ll need Pro Tools 12.8.1 or above to make use of the TC/E option. See the table below for a more detailed comparison.

Elastique Pitch V2

Elastique Pitch is the real time pitch shifting solution for RTAS, VST, AU and AAX. Powered by zplane's élastiquePro pitch shifting engine which is used by millions of end users around the world, the plugin ensures the highest, program independent pitch shifting quality.

Elastique Pitch focuses on the essential things: you won't find any unnecessary or confusing controls or functionality. Instead, the plugin offers you quality, stability, and ease of use.

In the second edition, they have added a feedback delay and the infiniSTRETCH function of the new élastiquePro v3 engine. Both make it easy to use Elastique Pitch in a more creative way.

Retune

reTune gives you full access to the pitch content of your audio samples and enables you to map each input pitch to any other pitch of the chromatic scale – all in realtime.

This allows you to re-tune your audio to any target key (e.g. from D major to C# minor), or to use it as a creative tool to modify the pitch content in any way you like. If you are unsure about the key of your input audio, you can let reTune estimate the key for you.

In addition, reTune can act as a pitch correction tool that quantizes pitches to the nearest semitone. Additional controls include the sensitivity of the pitch corrections, the treatment of transients as well as a smoothing of the pitch contours.

Check Out Our Reviews Of zplane’s ElastiqueAAX and Elastique Pitch V2…

See What Else You Can Win?

If you would like to win a prize like the Pitch and Tune Bundle from zplane worth $721 then go over to our Win Page and see what prizes we have on offer.