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Stations with slightly higher pitched/faster songs?

tall_guy1

tall_guy1

Star Participant
I know I've heard stations that do stuff like that on road trips and whatnot. Do you have any examples?
 
LibertyNT said:
You mean pitching up songs to fit more commercials! (The real goal back in the day)
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That was never the reason for pitching up. The idea dates back to the late 60's and 70's when we used everything from Scotch Tape(tm) around the capstan to devices that changed the frequency of AC in small increments and used them to drive the motors in the turntable.

In the days when most music was heard on AM radio, a station that slightly pitched up the music made "your" station sound brighter, so the same music on the competitor sounded, or so we thought, dull.

FM was already bright enough, so the idea just made music sound squeaky on that band. Then, of course, we got devices that allowed speeding up the music while keeping the pitch constant. Some stations do that today, but the amount of time "saved" out of each hour is less than 60 seconds... enough to play less than half of a song.

Music stations can already play as many commercials as they want. The reason they do not add any more minutes is based on ratings. So speeding up songs would only be done to play a tiny bit more music, which really has no gain. A possible exception would be with classic hits and gold based formats where a tiny bit of brightness enhancement may make older songs mastered for AM sound better.
 
CTListener said:
So the whole psychoacoustics justification -- "brighter sound" -- was just pseudo-science mumbo-jumbo?
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I did it on several stations in the 70's... all AMs... and a tiny enhancement did make the station sound "clearer" and "brighter".
 
tall_guy1 said:
Any who...any stations you know of that do this noticeably? You'll know it when you hear it.
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Actually, today, techniques exist to speed up the music without changing the pitch. If done moderately, it is not noticeable.
 
Hard to believe it would still be necessary today, with pop so relentlessly uptempo and beats-per-minute driven. I remember hearing some real Chipmunk-ish speed-ups on stations like WRKO Boston and WOLF Syracuse in the early '70s. It was really obvious on the songs those Top 40 stations had in common with uptempo ACs. In Syracuse, "Half-Breed" and "Eres Tu" were noticeably "brighter" on WOLF than on WHEN.
 
In the '80s, KHIT Seattle (now KRWM "Warm 106.9") was up about 2%.
 
Bongwater said:
In the '80s, KHIT Seattle (now KRWM "Warm 106.9") was up about 2%.
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KCBQ, San Diego did it. I think most of the "Q Format" stations did. KCBQ in early '75 was running so fast, the electric piano in the Ohio Players' "Skin Tight" sounded like Morse Code.

KTNQ (TenQ) in Los Angeles is another. And, for the year that Gerry Peterson was PD of KHJ, Los Angeles (January 1974-January 1975), they did it too. His successor, Charlie Van Dyke, ended the practice but didn't think it warranted re-carting the entire library, so the station gradually got back to normal speed as new records were dubbed, became hits, then recurrents, then oldies.
 
To this day, and I have little doubt our resident Cox employed member here in Houston would ever admit to the practice, KHPT/KGLK "106-9 & 107-5 The Eagle" speeds up the music by a slight margin. It is noticeable enough that I can match up a song such as Whitesnake's "Slow An' Easy" from my own personal library and run it against The Eagle's playback of the song, and be able to tell a slight difference. I would wager a good amount of listeners would never pay it any mind, but it's pretty easy to hear it when you have a good portion of the station's library to compare the playback speed against. It's not sped up so much to detract from the song itself, but to an ear that is finely tuned enough to catch such an occurrence, the practice is still very much a part of some station's arsenal. In years past, I have been told by radio pros that it was done in order to save enough time to legitimize that the station doing it was, in fact, playing more music than the competitor. Whether that explanation holds any truth is certainly debatable. Given the aforementioned example, this specific reasoning would be blown completely out of the water since Houston's Eagle has no competition in the classic rock realm.
 
Same thing with CKLW, they stopped speeding up but didn't re-cart what was already speeded up.

michael hagerty said:
KCBQ, San Diego did it. I think most of the "Q Format" stations did. KCBQ in early '75 was running so fast, the electric piano in the Ohio Players' "Skin Tight" sounded like Morse Code.

KTNQ (TenQ) in Los Angeles is another. And, for the year that Gerry Peterson was PD of KHJ, Los Angeles (January 1974-January 1975), they did it too. His successor, Charlie Van Dyke, ended the practice but didn't think it warranted re-carting the entire library, so the station gradually got back to normal speed as new records were dubbed, became hits, then recurrents, then oldies.
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This goes back to that one Hot 101.5 pitch "normality" post I made (as a guest, when it was allowed), where they changed their pitch of their songs from "high pitch" to "normal" (like in music videos on YouTube or audio clips on most music websites, like Spotify). I still have a little dislike on WPOI-FM in Tampa because of that, which started in the summer of 2014. I think this post claims it doesn't live up to it's slogan, not "all the hits" part (that one is doing great), I mean the "fewer commercials" part. The length of the commercials make it that they take longer than usual. FLZ is however still doing this, and that was why I favored them and "switched" to them around that time period. Between 2012 and the summer of 2014, I had a strong liking for 101.5, but I liked 93.3 and 101.5 evenly. I think it was on the Tampa Bay forum, it was a long time since I posted there, but then Frank (who, to me is probably the big guy in this website ;) ) posted his opinions there.

So, WPOI and WFLZ, both in Tampa Bay (GO BOLTS! They are in the semi-finals with the Pens :D) had a pitch (according to Audacity) of 1/2%, until 2014, when Hot changed their pitch to normal, and still does it today, where only a few of their songs (mostly ones from the last half of the decade or late 2000's songs) are still at that 1/2% high pitch. Hear the pitch difference of a song like Lukas Graham's 7 Years (normal pitch) from Disclosure's Latch or Lorde's Team (or another 2011-2014 song that sounds "high pitched) on Hot 101.5. There is a difference in the pitch of the songs. I still like everything else, in my opinion (the DJs, the songs, everything else), just not the pitch of their songs.
 
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Also, stations with higher pitched songs are decreasing , especially Entercom, as I believe, so I don't know if they really did this or not, but they may have mandated that almost all their Pop stations play their songs with a normal pitch and not a high pitch anymore. That happened to B97 and Star 94 in NOLA and Atlanta respectively. B93.7, Alice 105.9, Mix 94.7, 99.5 ZPL, 98.5 KTK, Z104, 99.7 The Point, 107.9 The End and 98 PXY already had their songs at normal pitch, so no change for them. The only stations that haven't changed their pitch is Kiss 98.5 in Buffalo and 103.7 Kiss FM in Milwaukee, maybe they are the exceptions.
 
I remember during the mid 00's there was technology to 'time scrunch' -- shorten the track without changing pitch.

Always sounded horrible, no matter how much you did to it -- especially if the source was an Mp3.

I'm sure the technology to do so has improved somewhat by now, though.
 
There are too many to count. About half of today's country stations speed up their music. Both KXDD and KDBL here do it, as well as KIOK Richland, (and on some songs) KMPS and KKWF Seattle.
Most Top 40's are also doing this as well. We are living in 2016, so I'm not sure if today it's about throwing another minute of commercials into the break, or if it's still about brighter sound.
KLTH Portland (Classic Hits) does the same thing. Same with KISC Spokane (AC). Yes, even classic hits/soft rock is being sped up.
 
crainbebo said:
I'm not sure if today it's about throwing another minute of commercials into the break, or if it's still about brighter sound.
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With PPM it's helpful if songs take less time. Everything is about getting to the point, and not wasting the listeners' time. Some stations are airing edits to keep songs less than 2 minutes. That means more songs, and less time spent with each one.
 
I am starting a new thread that is the opposite to this one. It's stations that switched from slightly higher pitched songs to normally pitched songs.
 
I also realized that in the UK, there isn't that much pop stations that play higher pitched songs (such as 93.3 FLZ here in the US). If you are trying to find higher pitxhed stations, good luck trying to find them in the UK, because Radio 1 and Capital play their songs normally. :(
 
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