Giga Pitch Track Adjustment

Gigasampler/Studio is interesting when it comes to Pitch Tracking and Tuning.

Pitch Tracking (sometimes called Key Tracking) refers to a common sampler control where the keyboard no longer has an effect on the playback pitch of a sample. Giga has this control under the Mix/Layer tab in the editor. Normally, this is turned On by default on samplers.

This feature mainly is applied to drums. Since it's not easy to play a single key quickly, the same sample is placed on adjacent keys and two fingers can play the same drum quickly. Turning Pitch Track off is useful when simulating a inharmonic sound, such as a breath on a flute, layered with the actual pitched sound of an instrument.

When you turn Pitch Track off (unchecking it in the editor), it does the job - the keyboard no longer has an effect on the pitch of the sample. However...

Giga lacks a proper Coarse Tuning control. When Pitch Track is On, the Unity Note serves as a way to alter the apparant pitch of the sample. But when the Pitch Track is Off (unchecked), the Unity Note rightly has no effect on the sound. When you play the keyboard, the pitch of the sample is exactly how it was recorded in the first place, aside that you can later the pitch 50 cents either way. But that's Fine Tuning, not Coarse Tuning.

(The tuning parameters in the Sample dialog do not affect the pitch - they are their for reference only, although you can alter the Region tuning parameters from that location.)

Many, if not all, samplers have coarse tuning controls that work when their Pitch Track is turned off. Translator has to resort to tricks - if a incoming KeyRange has Pitch Track off, and has more than a +-50 cent tuning offset, Giga can't handle it if we translated it "as is." So Translator tries two things:

If the sample is consistantly pitched the same way on ever occasion, we alter the tuning of the sample by adjusting the Sample Rate. This isn't adustable in Giga, surprisingly enough.

If the sample is ptiched differently in different areas or Instruments, we turn Giga Pitch Track On, instead of Off, and create one-note Regions that have the correct tuning for each key.

This is a new feature of 2.5, and is completely unique to Translator.