Nick – thanks for sharing whatever you can – it all helps.
I’ve been having a lot of fun with my Elektron Octatrack doing extreme time stretching and pitch shifting and I remembered the H8000 had some algorithms to do that, so I gave them a try. Your additional explanations certainly will help, combined with some more hands-on experimenting. I poke around the other suggestions you made as well. I’m not really looking for natural (obviously), just wanted to understand what the parameters were doing so I could better exploit them. 
Tom
