Change tempo orchestral quality ruined and drums clean

Audacity Help Forum macOS
1

Hey, guys, anyone,

I would not call myself an expert, I’m not a music producer pr anything, just a teacher that uses basic audacity skills to edit tracks for my classes. I have 2 problems:

  1. I am trying to change the tempo on a piece of the track, but the quality plummets - either I hit the high quality option or not. The track is already a full orchestra with a choir, so any more “arena” sound just makes it insufferable! What can I do to maintain quality?

  2. I am trying (i.e. i researched and studied for 3 hours in order to understand how the equaliser works, and where the best tuning is for the drum kit) to make the drum set sounds more vibrant, toms and floor drums mainly, but since this is an orchestral piece there are too many instruments that hit the same frequencies, so it just comes out “muddy” and chaotic. I tried duplicating the track, and equalising the first’s higher and the second’s lower frequencies, but again the result felt “choked”, even after amplifying it. Does anyone have any idea as to how i can fix this?
    Please and thank u in advance :slight_smile:

2

Small changes in tempo usually gives good quality results. For bigger changes, there is inevitably some loss of sound quality.


With only a mix of all the instruments, your options are severely limited. The “professional” way would be to start with a multi-track recording, with many microphones to pick up different instrument groups, in addition to the main stereo pair.

orchestra.jpg
orchestra.jpg1920×1080 315 KB

3

Thank you @steve ! Unfortunately it’s not an original track so I don’t really have the multi-channel option - it’s just a song from iTunes. I’ll try to compromise. I appreciate the info!