Analogicus
Member
HOW,
Not sure what you mean by "indefinite pitch", but having pipes slightly out of tune with each other and sounding together adds a vibrancy which is very desirable if it is not overdone. As with all such matters, it can become very much a matter of individual taste. The standard soundfont protocols allow you to set the "fine tuning" of individual notes to achieve that result, but as the smallest "off-tune" available is usually one cent, this is not very useful for the notes at the top of the range, because it produces beat rates which are too fast to be pleasant. One workaround is to make samples for those high notes where you have detuned the pitch by less than one cent, and the Audacity Speed-Adjust function comes to the rescue for that. (I prefer that to the Pitch-Adjust function, as I seemed to get better results that way when I was learning to do these things. I find Audacity invaluable, and also Viena from the SynthFont website).
I should warn you that whether or not the beating together of two tones is a pleasant result, depends very much on the nature of those tones and their loudness relative to each other. I tend to avoid tuning differences for tones with the same basic pitch in case it sounds too much like a celeste effect. An exception would be reed stops, where low in the range I certainly detune them from flue stops of the same basic pitch. However I remember one instance where the 8' reed caused an unpleasant beating when used with the main 8' flue stop in the same department, but it only seemed to happen on one particular note, so on that one note I abandoned the reed detuning, making its pitch identical to the flue stop pitch.
Analogicus
Not sure what you mean by "indefinite pitch", but having pipes slightly out of tune with each other and sounding together adds a vibrancy which is very desirable if it is not overdone. As with all such matters, it can become very much a matter of individual taste. The standard soundfont protocols allow you to set the "fine tuning" of individual notes to achieve that result, but as the smallest "off-tune" available is usually one cent, this is not very useful for the notes at the top of the range, because it produces beat rates which are too fast to be pleasant. One workaround is to make samples for those high notes where you have detuned the pitch by less than one cent, and the Audacity Speed-Adjust function comes to the rescue for that. (I prefer that to the Pitch-Adjust function, as I seemed to get better results that way when I was learning to do these things. I find Audacity invaluable, and also Viena from the SynthFont website).
I should warn you that whether or not the beating together of two tones is a pleasant result, depends very much on the nature of those tones and their loudness relative to each other. I tend to avoid tuning differences for tones with the same basic pitch in case it sounds too much like a celeste effect. An exception would be reed stops, where low in the range I certainly detune them from flue stops of the same basic pitch. However I remember one instance where the 8' reed caused an unpleasant beating when used with the main 8' flue stop in the same department, but it only seemed to happen on one particular note, so on that one note I abandoned the reed detuning, making its pitch identical to the flue stop pitch.
Analogicus