What is varispeed and what can you do with it? Elastic Audio has been around for over a decade and we take for granted the fact that you can manipulate pitch without affecting playback speed and playback speed without affecting pitch.

This wasn’t always the case and the sound of varispeed effects are part of the vocabulary of sound, from chipmunk voices through to sinister downpitched effects, the biggest advantage of varispeed is that the artefacts which inevitably accompany timestretching a pitch shifting effects don’t affect varispeed because the relationship between speed and pitch is respected.

Varispeed can be used from the elastic audio properties window, eneable eleastic audio in the track header, select your clip or clips and hit alt+Num5 to perform a static varispeed effect. Usefully the window displays the pitch shift introduced by a specific change to the playback speed.

To perform dynamic varispeed effects things are a little more complicated. you need to use the conductor track to dynamically control the varispeed effect on a tick based track with Elastic Audio enabled and set to Varispeed mode. See how it works in the free video.