Can you guys please point me to the correct place in the ops manual for how to do this?
I have a MIDI piano piece intentionally played with varying tempo (pauses; a little faster in choruses than verses; a little faster towards the end than at the beginning; and a fair amount of ritandos, accelerandos, (and “oopsondos” ).
I’d like to wind up with a tempo track on C6 based on how the MIDI track was recorded … then I’d edit/modify the track for the places I played wrong (“drag the beat marker to the left/right”?).
What is the best and least time consuming way to do this? Can C6 do pretty much all of that (except for the editing of my playing mistakes)?
Thanks for your suggestion, mashedmitten. I’ve done all three, and really haven’t been able to find what I’m looking for - which I think is the MIDI equivalent of the Tempo Detection tool described on page 473 of the Ops Manual: Play MIDI >> C6 analyzes played MIDI >> C6 creates tempo track. As near as I can tell, the Tempo Detection tool only works for audio … ?
I know I can use the Warp Tool on page 469 to generate a tempo map for freely played MIDI, but it involves a manual beat-by-beat method similar to what I used to use in SX3 … I was hoping/wondering if maybe C6 had something new and less tedious/time intensive than that.
I guess I could generate the Tempo Track to match the freely played part after I render to Audio, I hadn’t thought of that. Though it would be a whole lot easier to edit the MIDI playing if it had an accurate tempo track …
So, I think what I’m looking for is a C6 “Tempo Detection”-type function for MIDI … Or is there another way to get this done nicely?
As you’re dealing with a freely-modified tempo, with pauses, I think manually working through the piece aligning bard (and sometimes beats) with the Warp Tool will be your best method.
The auto-detection methods work best on music with a strong, constant beat that ATTEMPTS to keep a steady tempo but sometimes fails
If using the other editors is vexing look up “Merge Tempo from Tapping”. You have to tap along with the whole piece (or part) in another track. Apply “MTF Tapping” and you will have generated a pattern of tempo data in the tempo track which will control any speeds in that piece.
Very cool to know, to have another tool in the box, thanks Conman!
I’ve spent a few hours on learning the Warp thing. I’m not sure I fully understand it, but it got the job done.
One of the things that befuddles me is that the act of dragging a warp tab seems (sometimes?) to physically move notes that come after. My understanding is that Cubase automatically goes out of musical mode while dragging, so I can’t figure out why that happens.
Also, if I had a little more confidence in my understanding/interpretation of what is going on, I’d say there was a mistake in the manual. It says to lock a point of the piece in time, do a SHIFT-click, and it will put a warp tab there. I found that the SHIFT only showed the warp tap, but when the SHIFT was released no tab was applied. I had to use the CTRL-click to get it to apply a tab to “tack it down”.
The audio to tempo map stuff works pretty well in C6. Haven’t played with tempo to midi - but… if it doesn’t work that well, I’d render it the midi to audio, and use that for the tempo map.
Hey, js1, thanks much for that! I gave that a try today, but the results weren’t so hot - like Laurence Payne above suggested might be the case, it didn’t work so well on my free-tempo piano. Looking at where C6 drew Warp Tabs, I think it just had a hard time figuring out where the beats were. Maybe tempo detection just for things where the transients stick out a lot, as in drums.
I’m wondering this too…I usually follow a pre-set click track but have been laying down some midi drum tracks “freestyle” and now want to set the tempo of the song to it without it adjusting the tempo of the midi drum track I just laid down.
It seems kinda simple…I realize that my drum track might not be perfect but a tempo detection tool that would at least give me a general idea of bpms would be nice; and then I could quantize the rest of the drum part to fit.
we hope that the newly introduced “MIDI Tempo Detection” function in Cubase 8 has now fulfilled your described wishes
Do enjoy the new time saver function. Thanks!
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