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Varispeed in every DAW

Gazillion Industries · September 24, 2026

The question turns up on plugin forums every few months, in the same shape: is there anything that does what the speed knob on a tape machine did? Pitch and tempo together, on a fader, while the track runs.

Four of the five big DAWs have something and none of them agree on where to put it: a warp mode per clip in Ableton Live, a control bar readout in Logic Pro, an Elastic Audio plug-in in Pro Tools, a stretch mode in FL Studio, nothing in GarageBand. All of them are global or per clip. None is a knob you can hold while the track runs. SKRUU is ours: PITCH and TIME on separate controls, on an insert, $29 for Mac and Windows.

The short version

Hear it

One mechanism, five menus

Underneath all five names there is one operation: read the samples out at a different rate than they went in. The audio gets shorter and higher, or longer and lower, and the whole recording moves together — the voice, the room behind it, the hiss, the reverb tail. Nothing is being reconstructed, so nothing can be reconstructed badly. The full picture is in what is varispeed.

The numbers are the same in every DAW because they are arithmetic, not features. Double speed is exactly +12 semitones and half speed exactly −12. One semitone is a ratio of about 1.059, near enough 6%. A 45 rpm record played at 33⅓ runs at about 74% speed, roughly 5.2 semitones down. That is why a 3% nudge you can barely see on a fader is a pitch move your ear files under "different key."

Keep it straight from the other two operations, because the DAWs put all three in the same menus and that is where the confusion starts. Pitch shifting moves pitch and leaves length alone. Time stretching moves length and leaves pitch alone. Varispeed refuses to separate them — see how to change pitch without changing tempo. So the only live question on this page is whose hand is on the rate control, and whether you can move it while the music plays.

Varispeed plugin for Ableton: Re-Pitch first, then the knob

Live's varispeed is a warp mode, not a device. Ableton's manual describes warping as a way to treat audio as elastic, and it says outright that warping can be used to mimic the way analog tape works by moving pitch and timing at the same time. That mode is called Re-Pitch, and it sits alongside Beats, Tones, Texture and Complex in the clip's Warp Mode chooser. Pick Re-Pitch and the clip stops trying to hold its pitch: change the Set tempo and the clip's key moves with it, the way a record does. It costs nothing and it is the right first move.

Three things follow from it being a clip property. It is set per clip, so a Set full of audio needs the mode chosen on every one of them. It only responds to tempo — there is no Re-Pitch amount you can grab and ride. And it does nothing to MIDI tracks or software instruments, so everything that is not audio stays in the old key while the samples move. The warp modes are compared in varispeed in Ableton Live.

So a search for a varispeed VST for Ableton is usually after one of two different things. One is a whole-Set transpose, which is what the Max for Live devices in this lane do. The other is a knob on a channel you can automate, perform and record, which is what an insert does — and an insert is the only one of the two that works on a live input, a return, or the master while Live is playing.

SKRUU is the second kind, and it is the one we make: a varispeed pitch and time stretch plugin for Mac and Windows, AU and VST3, $29. PITCH and TIME are separate controls, so you can speed it up while pitching down, or the other way round, and lock one and play the other. It loads as an ordinary insert, so the ride is a normal automation lane in Live, Logic, FL Studio or GarageBand. There's a demo on the page.

Varispeed plugin for Logic: it is already in the control bar

Logic Pro has the most complete native version, and it is the reason half the people asking this question are asking it. Apple's user guide describes Varispeed as a way to speed up or slow down the entire project, with a range of −50%, half the project tempo, to +100%, double it. There are three modes in the Varispeed display. Speed Only changes the speed and pitch-shifts the master output back to compensate, so the pitch stays put. Varispeed (Speed and Pitch) lets the pitch follow the speed. Varispeed and MIDI does the same and also transposes external MIDI tracks, quantized to semitones. The value reads four ways: as a percentage, as the resulting tempo in bpm, as a detune in semitones and cents, or as a tuning reference in Hz. If the readout is missing from your control bar, it is one of the Custom LCD options.

Then the limit, and it is the same one Live has from the other direction: Logic's Varispeed is global. It moves the whole project, it cannot be drawn as a curve inside a song, and it is a monitoring and practice tool as much as a production one. One track dropped 4% against a stationary arrangement is a different musical idea from the whole record dropped 4%, and the control bar will only ever give you the second. SKRUU is an Audio Unit, so it sits on the one track, leaves the rest of the session where it was, and holds whatever shape you draw in the automation lane.

Varispeed plugin for FL Studio: the setting is called Resample

FL Studio hides its varispeed in the Time stretching and pitch shifting panel of Channel Settings, and the setting you want is Mode, set to Resample. Image-Line's manual describes Resample as standard pitch shifting that varies sample length with sample pitch, and says that when the TIME knob is set to anything other than "(none)" — locked to Project tempo, for instance — it works like a tape or a record, where pitch changes with play speed. The panel gives you PITCH, MUL for a quick length multiplier, and TIME for the resulting duration, with offline and realtime options; offline is the higher quality of the two but cannot be used with tempo changes.

Two consequences before you set it. On an Audio Clip, Resample means the clip changes pitch whenever the project tempo changes or you stretch the clip in the Playlist. In the Piano roll it means a chord plays each note back at a different speed, which is sampler tuning and sounds like it. The other modes on that menu run on zplane's Elastique Pro engine and hold pitch while time moves; Resample is the one that refuses to.

None of it is a performance control, which is the same gap again. FL Studio hosts VST3, so SKRUU goes in a mixer insert slot and the move becomes an automation clip like every other move in the project.

Varispeed plugin for Pro Tools: it is an Elastic Audio plug-in

Pro Tools puts varispeed where you would least expect a plugin: in the Elastic Audio slot on the track, not in an insert. Avid's reference guide lists Varispeed alongside Polyphonic, Rhythmic, Monophonic, X-Form and zplane's élastique Pro, and describes it as the plug-in to use to link time and pitch changes for tape-like speed change effects and post production work. It states plainly that the Varispeed plug-in provides no plug-in specific controls.

You enable Elastic Audio on the track, pick Varispeed from the Elastic Audio Plug-In pop-up menu, then choose Real-Time or Rendered Processing. Avid's own note on the choice is useful: real-time is immediate but more demanding of system resources, and rendered is non-real-time but lighter, so a loaded session should use rendered. Clips go offline while they are analyzed and come back when the analysis finishes. One documented behavior catches people out: under Varispeed, pitch and time are always linked, but any transposition applied earlier under Polyphonic or Rhythmic stays in the clip's metadata, so switching away and back returns the clip to its original pitch shift while keeping the stretch. Decide which algorithm a track lives in before you start editing.

This is the one section on the page where we are not the answer. SKRUU ships as an AU, a VST3 and a standalone application, and there is no AAX build, so the insert route is not open to it here. Use the Elastic Audio plug-in in Pro Tools, or make the move in another host and bring the file in.

Varispeed plugin for GarageBand: the one that has none

GarageBand has no varispeed. Apple's GarageBand user guide has no Varispeed page, and the nearest thing is the Transpose slider in the Audio Editor inspector, which moves audio regions up or down by up to 12 semitones with the Region button selected. That is pitch shifting: the region keeps its length and the pitch moves on its own, which is the opposite of what a speed change does.

That makes GarageBand the clearest case for a plugin on this page, and the easiest one to fix, because GarageBand hosts Audio Units. SKRUU installs as an AU, so it behaves in GarageBand exactly as it does in Logic Pro: a continuous pitch and speed control on the track, an automation lane to draw it in, and a host that shipped without one now having one.

The two third-party names that come up

Both get named in these threads, and neither of them is the rideable insert the thread is asking for. What follows was read off the maker's own page, and where no price appears we could not read one today and would rather say nothing than guess.

GSi VariSpeed. Free, for Windows, macOS and Linux, currently version 1.0.0. Know what it is before you download it: GSi describe it as a simulation of a belt-drive tape echo whose capstan motor can change speed, so the speed control varies the delay time, reproduced as is with nothing added beyond being digital and MIDI-controllable. A fine free tape echo, and a different job from moving the key of a session.

Varispeed by Elisabeth Homeland. A Max for Live device rather than a plugin, so it needs Live with Max for Live rather than a plugin folder. It transposes the audio and MIDI clips in both Session and Arrangement view while changing the Set's tempo to match, and it can leave tracks out by a keyword in the track name, so the drums stay where they are. That is the whole-Set transpose answer for Live, and the nearest thing in Live to what Logic's control bar does: global, and set rather than played.

Neither one puts your hand on the rate while the track is running, which is the thing that started the thread. That is what SKRUU is for, and the four files further up this page are it, running.

What to check before you commit to one

Four checks, in the DAW rather than in a demo video. They are also the four we built ours against, so the answers for it are here next to the questions.

The pitch control has to be continuous and not stepped to semitones, or it is a transposer wearing a speed knob's clothes and it cannot slide. SKRUU's PITCH covers −20% to +10% in 128 states: thirty percentage points of rate cut that fine averages under a quarter of a percent a step, roughly a twenty-fifth of a semitone, and the readout gives you semitones and speed at once so you can see both.

It has to report its latency to the host, because an insert that lies about latency drifts against everything else in the session. SKRUU runs at zero samples of latency, so there is nothing to report and nothing to line back up afterwards.

It has to render the same offline as it sounds in real time, so bounce a ramp and compare. The four files near the top of this page were rendered offline through the same engine the plug-in runs, which is that comparison made in public rather than promised.

And it has to survive movement: every speed change is a resampling operation, and cheap interpolation puts a gritty edge on fast moves that shows up on a held tone long before it shows up on drums — the mechanism is what is aliasing in audio. Ride the control hard over a pad. If it sounds like sandpaper, you have your answer. The grit in the fourth audio file is there on purpose, with SAMPLING GRADE set to 3.9 kHz, which is a switch you throw rather than a symptom you inherit.

Set it up and test it in ten minutes

Ours, in whichever of these hosts you are in. Run the same ten minutes on anything else you are considering and compare the two sets of notes.

1. Load a full-mix loop of about eight bars on an audio track and set it playing.
2. Insert SKRUU as the first device on the track, before any other processing.
3. Move PITCH to −5% and listen for one full pass.
4. Double-click PITCH to return it to unity and confirm the loop still lines up with the grid.
5. Write a slow automation ramp on PITCH from unity to −12% across four bars.
6. Write a fast ramp over half a bar and listen to the same four bars again.
7. Bounce the section and compare the bounce against what you heard live.
8. Swap the loop for a held synth pad and repeat both ramps.
9. Turn ELASTIC on, move PITCH by hand, and let go.
10. Set RETURN and SLOPE until the way back sounds deliberate rather than accidental.
11. Set SAMPLING GRADE to 7.81 kHz and play the pad through it once more.

Where it goes in the chain

Put it first on the track, ahead of anything that reacts to level or to time. A compressor after a varispeed dip hears a quieter, longer signal and responds correctly; a compressor before one has its release times dragged around, which sounds like a fault in the compressor rather than a move in the music. If what follows it is a drum bus and you do not already have a compressor you trust there, DRUGS is our free one-knob bus compressor for drums, Mac and Windows, with a DOSE control, a GAIN control and a soft ceiling on the way out. Judge it by bypassing the plugin rather than by turning DOSE down.

Reverb and delay belong after it too. A move that pulls the tail down with the source reads as one machine slowing, while a dry source sagging into a stationary tail reads as two recordings glued together. Either can be right — make the call with a send, on purpose, rather than by leaving the insert order where it fell. The slowed case is worked through in how to make slowed and reverb, and the Houston version of it in how to chop and screw.

What it costs you

A global varispeed costs you your monitoring reference. Logic's is honest about this: the tempo display keeps showing the original tempo while the project plays at the new one, so the numbers on screen stop describing what is in the room. Leave it on and you will mix a record at a speed it will never be heard at.

A per-track varispeed costs you sync, and ours is no exception. Slow one track by 4% and it is late by the end of the bar, which is either the point or a problem depending on whether you meant it. And any deep slow down costs you top end, because the highs move down with everything else: an 8 kHz cymbal at −12 semitones sits at 4 kHz, and no amount of EQ puts back air that is no longer in the file.

Questions people ask

So what do I actually use?

If the move is global and you are only auditioning — the whole project up 4% to hear what it does — your host already has it: Logic's control bar Varispeed, Re-Pitch on the clip in Live, Resample in FL Studio, the Varispeed plug-in under Elastic Audio in Pro Tools. If the move is part of the record, so it has to live on one track, be automated, be performed and be printed, that is an insert. Ours is SKRUU: $29, AU and VST3, Mac and Windows, with a demo and the full control list on the page.

Is there a varispeed plugin for Ableton?

Yes. SKRUU is one: a VST3 insert with a continuous pitch and speed control you can automate on a single track, plus a separate TIME control for length, $29 for Mac and Windows. The other kind is a Max for Live device, which transposes every clip and the tempo together rather than handing you a knob. Live's own Re-Pitch warp mode is the free starting point, set per clip, and it follows the Set tempo rather than your hand.

Does Ableton have a Varispeed like Logic Pro?

Not as a single global control. Logic Pro has a Varispeed display in the control bar that moves the entire project between −50% and +100%. The closest equivalents in Live are a Max for Live device that transposes all clips and changes the Set tempo to match, or the Re-Pitch warp mode applied clip by clip. An insert such as SKRUU answers it from the other end: one track, continuous, automatable, and the same plug-in in every host that takes AU or VST3.

How do you do varispeed in FL Studio?

Open Channel Settings for the sample, find the Time stretching and pitch shifting panel, and set Mode to Resample. Image-Line's manual states that Resample varies sample length with sample pitch, and that with the TIME knob set to something other than "(none)" it works like a tape or a record, with pitch changing along with play speed. For a version you can ride and automate on the mixer rather than set in a panel, put a varispeed insert on the channel; SKRUU is a VST3.

Does Pro Tools have varispeed?

Yes. Varispeed is one of the Elastic Audio plug-ins. Enable Elastic Audio on the track, select Varispeed from the Elastic Audio Plug-In pop-up menu, and choose Real-Time or Rendered processing. Avid document it as the option for linking time and pitch changes for tape-like speed effects, and note that it has no controls of its own. SKRUU has no AAX build, so in Pro Tools this is the route in front of you.

Does GarageBand have varispeed?

No. GarageBand's user guide has no Varispeed feature. The Audio Editor can transpose regions up or down by up to 12 semitones, which moves pitch without moving length. For speed and pitch together you need an Audio Unit plugin on an insert, which GarageBand hosts; SKRUU installs as one, on the same Mac, for $29.

Is varispeed the same as time stretching?

No, they are opposites. Time stretching changes length and holds pitch by re-synthesizing material that was never recorded, which is where artifacts come from. Varispeed changes the playback rate and lets pitch follow, so there is nothing to invent and nothing to smear. SKRUU carries both, on separate knobs: PITCH moves the rate, TIME moves the length only. The trade-offs are laid out in time stretching explained.

What SKRUU does

SKRUU is two knobs that do not touch each other, loaded as a normal insert in any host that takes an AU or a VST3. PITCH runs from −20% to +10% in 128 states and reads out in semitones as well as speed. TIME runs from −50% to +25% and moves nothing but the length, so you can speed up while pitching down, or hold one with PITCH LOCK or TIME LOCK and play the other. ELASTIC makes the knob sprung: move it, let go, and it travels home, with RETURN for how long that takes, BITE for how hard it commits, and sixteen SLOPE shapes for the road back. DRAG sets how long a new speed takes to arrive, and SAMPLING GRADE steps the rate down through 31.25, 15.62, 7.81 and 3.91 kHz. AU, VST3 and standalone, Mac and Windows, zero samples of latency, $29 — hear it on the SKRUU page.

The forum answer is always a list of warp modes, because the warp modes are the true answer to a narrower question. Every DAW can already change speed and let pitch follow. What a plugin adds is a hand on the control while the track is running, and that hand is the entire product.

Keep reading

• What is varispeed — Speed and pitch together: the math, how it differs from pitch shifting, and how it's used.
• How to change pitch without changing tempo — How pitch shifting and time stretching work, which mode to use, and how to avoid artifacts.
• Time stretching explained — How the algorithms work, which mode to use, and when to repitch instead.
• How to make slowed and reverb — Slow it with varispeed, add a long dark reverb, and make sped-up versions too.
• How to chop and screw a song — Where DJ Screw's Houston sound comes from, and how to screw and chop a song in a DAW.

Gazillion Industries LLC · reading material