OK guys. I have done (and asked) something similar before and, although following the solution worked, this time may be different so I want to run this by you…
The scenario; you have 2 projects of the same song recorded at different bpm. They are both the same length and same key but one is at 72 bpm and the other at 76 bpm. The 76 bpm is the one I want to use except that the backing vocals from the 72 bpm files are way better. They appear on 3 choruses only. If I drop the wav into the project and line up the first chorus, the change in bpm becomes obvious pretty quickly. There are no places to make cuts within the choruses but, obviously there is plenty of space otherwise. My thought process goes like this:
1 Cut the 72 bpm vocals into complete bar sections in their own 72 bpm project
2 Export them into the 76 bpm project and align with each chorus start point
3 Use the resize tool to warp the audio by moving the end points to the correct place
4 Bounce new audio
-Import the 72 bpm chorus wavs into your 76 bpm project
-in the pool enter the 72 bpm tempo definition for the 72 bpm files
-set the audio tracks with the 72 bpm wavs to musical timebase
-In the pool activate musical mode for the 72 bpm files
-(If not done already) set project tempo to 76 bpm
Well, indeed it DID work, but I have yet to get my head around why or how. The only thing which hampered me a little is that the destination project had micro tempo changes every quarter note rather than being a solid 76 bpm. This hasn’t made it impossible though, as I can still snip the sections apart and manually line up the start of each one, if required. Probably won’t be though.
Thanks for the help, and if you can tell me why activating musical mode and entering a tempo in the pool works, I’d appreciate it very much. Have RTFM on the topic but it’s sketchy, to say the least.
Because musical mode is there to adjust audio files to different tempi just like MIDI files. For this to work, Cubase has to know the original tempo of the audio file. If the audio file is consistent in tempo, it´s as simple as just typing in the tempo, if it isn´t, tempo definition gets more complicated, but it works for such files as well.
In case you just want to speed up or slow down a whole project without knowing the tempo of the single files, you can just type in the same tempo that your project is actually set to at the moment, set files to musical mode, and change the tempo. If done correctly, cubase will speed up or slow down all files relative to the tempo change, but keep everything in time, (and also keep relative tempo fluctuations of the original).
When I get a set of audio files from someone else’s work, I drop them into a blank project set to 120 bpm default. I leave them in linear mode and set about lining up the ruler by writing a tempo track. Sometimes I have a click track they used, sometimes they tell me the tempo of the recordings and sometimes I have a midi file I can use to generate a tempo track. Once I have that aligned, I continue until finished. I’ve never tried to change the tempo of a project, and I obviously don’t yet grasp musical mode.