Studio Pro: Pitch Curves For Audio Clips

Studio Pro’s new Pitch Curves feature has both creative and corrective uses.

Pitch Curves can be enabled either in a clip’s right‑click menu...A new feature introduced with version 8.1 of Fender’s Studio Pro is Pitch Curves for audio clips. This function mirrors the existing Gain Curve workflow, but delivers very different outcomes. It can be used for simple pitch correction, but it really comes into its own when used creatively to play with the frequency content of your audio clips.

Before we get into the specifics, it would be good to remind ourselves about the nature and features of audio clips and how clip automation works in Studio Pro.

Audio Clips

A clip is a window onto an audio file in your session’s arrangement window, or clip launcher. When you drag audio files into your session from the Browser, they appear within a clip. When you record audio into a track, it creates a clip to represent the recorded take. The clip holds a bunch of metadata about the audio file, which allows you to enact a lot of editing and processes on it that are non‑destructive, and makes it easy to remove those processes or edit them further.

...or in a clip’s Inspector panel.When you copy or duplicate a clip, the copy will reference the same metadata, so edits made to one copy will apply to all instances of it in your project. This can be brilliant in most cases and disastrous in others, but it’s very easy to make a new version of a clip that’s independent and no longer tied to the other copies: simply right‑click the clip, point the mouse to Audio and then select New Clip Version. If you want to make a number of clips independent, you can go a slightly different route. Select all the clips and then right‑click, go to Event and select Separate Shared Copies. When you create new versions of clips, a tiny version number appears in the bottom‑left corner of the clip so you can keep track of which clips are related.

Pitch Curves

When we activate the Pitch Curve function, we will be acting on the currently selected clip and any other iterations of the same version. Right‑click on a clip, and in the top section of the right‑click menu you’ll find Pitch Curve, with a tick box and a bypass button. Click the tick box. You’ll also find this option in the Inspector for the clip over on the left. Click the ‘i’ button to reveal the Inspector, which is now located at the bottom‑left corner of Studio Pro, and scroll down to the bottom of the clip details.

With Pitch Curve enabled, a horizontal line appears along the centre of our clip, very much like any other automation curve, and exactly how the Gain Curve line appears. In fact, the Gain Curve and the Pitch Curve tick boxes are mutually exclusive, and the line that appears is identical in both cases and is edited in exactly the same way.