How many semitones is a key change?

One semitone is one step on a piano including the black notes, so C to C sharp. Moving a song from A to B is two. From C to G is seven. An octave is twelve.

Why does a big shift sound artificial?

Because keeping the length constant requires stretching the audio by the same factor as the pitch change, and stretching is a reconstruction. At small factors it is invisible; at large ones the grain joins become audible, particularly on sustained vowels.

Can I shift the pitch without any artefacts at all?

Only if you let the length change. Use Change Speed with the pitch lock off — that is a pure resample with no reconstruction in it, and the result is clean at any factor. It will be shorter or longer than the original.

Does this separate the vocal from the backing?

No. Everything in the file moves together, because it is one waveform. Isolating a vocal is a different problem entirely and needs a trained model rather than arithmetic.

Change Pitch

Move a recording up or down in semitones, same length.

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Ask about Change Pitch

Questions about what this tool does, which option to pick, or what it can and cannot handle.

This is the one part of the site that uses a server. The question you type here is sent to an AI provider to be answered — your files and whatever you put in the tool above are not, and the assistant cannot see them. Answers are generated and can be wrong; the tool itself is not guessing.

About the Change Pitch

Moving a recording to a different key without making it shorter or longer is a peculiar thing to ask a computer for, and it is worth understanding why, because it explains what the result will sound like.

Pitch and duration are naturally the same knob. Speed a recording up and everything in it rises; slow it down and everything falls. To change one without the other you have to do both and then undo half of it: resample the audio, which moves the pitch and the length together, then stretch it back to the length it started at without touching the pitch again. That second half is the same grain-matching machinery the speed tool uses.

The consequence is that pitch shifting is stretching, and stretching has a budget. A shift of one to three semitones is clean on almost anything. Past about five, the stretching needed to put the length back starts to be audible on voices in particular — a slight breathiness, a faint flutter on sustained notes. A full octave, twelve semitones, is dramatic and clearly processed, which is fine when that is the point.

Semitones are the unit because they are the unit music uses. Twelve is an octave. Two takes a song from A to B. Seven is a fifth. If you are moving a backing track to suit a singer, two or three either way is the usual amount and sits comfortably inside the clean range.

For anything where the length does not matter — a sound effect, a sample you are going to trim anyway — the speed tool with its pitch lock turned off will give you a cleaner result, because it does the resampling and stops. No stretching means nothing to hear artefacts from.

As with everything else here, the file stays on your machine. It is decoded, rearranged and re-encoded inside this tab.

How to use it

1Drop in the recording.
2Choose how many semitones to move it, up or down. Twelve is a full octave.
3Run it — the result is the same length as what you put in.
4Listen before you commit; large shifts are audible as processing.

Questions

How many semitones is a key change?: One semitone is one step on a piano including the black notes, so C to C sharp. Moving a song from A to B is two. From C to G is seven. An octave is twelve.
Why does a big shift sound artificial?: Because keeping the length constant requires stretching the audio by the same factor as the pitch change, and stretching is a reconstruction. At small factors it is invisible; at large ones the grain joins become audible, particularly on sustained vowels.
Can I shift the pitch without any artefacts at all?: Only if you let the length change. Use Change Speed with the pitch lock off — that is a pure resample with no reconstruction in it, and the result is clean at any factor. It will be shorter or longer than the original.
Does this separate the vocal from the backing?: No. Everything in the file moves together, because it is one waveform. Isolating a vocal is a different problem entirely and needs a trained model rather than arithmetic.