I have a live show I’ve been editing (why so many posts from me - using this gig to learn the new features).
Theres no click or tempo, it’s just a live show for 19 songs.
So without midi being used or tempo tracks, just keeping the tempo at the default 120 and using seconds at 29.9 drop (since this is all going to a video anyway in the end) instead of bars/beats.
Is there a way to align the live bass gtr and other audio tracks to the kick drums downbeats without doing it manually pulling each phrase back and forth to match drummer’s kick (he has impeccable time)?
I see in the manual for midi and for groove. Can audio for 3 minutes or so be set up to be a groove?
Or is there another way to drag and drop to get alignment, or a tutorial somewhere on this.
I thought this would be something folks would be doing all the time in recording studios to tighten up tracks.
Doing this to a live show could easily make a phasey mess of everything unless you are only shifting d.I tracks or have near zero spill on the mics you are shifting.
A live show recording is supposed to be representative of the band playing live after all
That aside my preferred way to do any fixing with free played audio is to first create a tempo map using time warp/warp grid. This way your grid follows the song tempo and you can use whichever quantise, warp or manual cut n slide techniques you like.
I would get new band members that can actually stay in time with the drummer as what ever way you try to do this is going cause so many artefacts that you will come back screaming bug or something not working properly so …
Thanks Grim for your post, it was a path I was pondering. I’m going to try that on one song and see if it works. I’ve had hitpoint results that weren’t so good in the past but if it’s just the kick drum that I use, it might actually work very weel in this case. Thanks again.
as for the all too typical ‘advice’ on why I choose to do this or that…on a software forum in general… thanks but no thanks.
I don’t like using tempo detection for this…as well as the slightly odd choices the algo can make it cannot tell when a hit is actually out of time and it also adds a marker on every hit when I don’t want that many.
With tempo warp/warp grid I work through the song manually placing a new tempo event every few bars, referencing the kick visually but also listening and putting some points off the kick if that particular hit is not where it feels like the bar should change.
If the timing seems particularly sloppy or accelerates/decelerates into a chorus over a few bars I’ll add extra events as needed but generally every couple of bars enough.
Can be quite time consuming but gets a lot quicker with practice.
Yes, Grim that’s what I’ve been doing in the arrange window for many years now.
As an arranger I am also called upon to do take downs (ex. Amer. Idol, or new singers with demos but no charts, or arrangements for something that has a piano and vocal only, etc.) and then transfer all that info into Sibelius for charts/arrangements/orchestrations using the original audio to play along with the new added tracks…or do it all in Cubase if they need the audio of the arrangement and not just the charts. That usually takes me an hour to do a pop song length tune. I’ve gotten pretty good with that over the years. But I’ve never quantized any audio in those situations. No real need to.
I’d hate doing it for a 2 hour concert that’s contiguous. But for a single song, no problem.
I’ve chuncked it down to the front part of the concert (40 min) the middle (piano duets for 30 min) and the last half with the orch returning and a choir added (20 min). I’m avoiding doing this project into single songs since there’s a lot of MC and actors and singer talk between songs (like a broadway show) and I don’t want to end up doing a lot of resynching in the end. 3 x is enough not to complain, ha.
But now that I’m thinking all about this over again to make things work faster, I think the kick drum will be fine.
I’ve chuncked it down to the front part of the concert (40 min) the middle (piano duets for 30 min) and the last half with the orch returning and a choir added (20 min). I’m avoiding doing this project into single songs since there’s a lot of MC and actors and singer talk between songs (like a broadway show) and I don’t want to end up doing a lot of resynching in the end. 3 x is enough not to complain, ha.
Yeah, that does sound kinda like hard work…never had to do more than 7 minutes at a time!
Hope you get it sorted without too much pain!
I was at Namm the other week and presented this question to both Steinberg guys (Greg being on of them).
He used the ‘Advanced’ menu and created a tempo track from the kick drum.
Then quantized the bass to the kick or everything quantized to the kick created tempo track…
nice…
I explained my complicated project and he said that either I use 120 and then start the same process (using the advanced menu option to create a tempo track from the kick of the next song) again getting a wacky bar just before the new tempo track to get a downbeat bar that works and then the tempo track gets kicked in from there again. And so on until the concert is complete. Or just edit the project into copies, one per song and use the same method.
This is similar to the demo I saw him do at a producers Cubase 7.5 night at Westlake Music in LA a couple months ago,
but forgot that he did it from the advanced pull down item to create a tempo track from the audio of a kick drum track (needs to be something pretty steady and consistent).
.