How to get variable tempo under control?

Cubase
1

I’m revisiting an old project and trying to sort out how to deal with a tempo track on it.

The initial tracks were recorded to a free tempo & speed up a fair amount over the course of the song.
After this initial recording I created a Tempo Track for it and set up a grid.
Then I recorded a bunch of additional tracks against this varying tempo but on the grid.
Finally these recordings were comped on a bunch of the tracks.

When played back using the initial Tempo Track values everything sounds fine.

But I want to adjust the Tempo Track to reduce the the speedup a bit over the course of the song. In the old version of the Project none of the audio files are set to Musical Mode. So I set all of them to Musical Mode (the Tracks were already set to Musical Timebase). Now when I play it back without changing anything other than the setting on the files everything is out of sync. So I need to both get the recordings to stay in sync yet still be in Musical Mode.

I’m thinking of rendering each Audio Track and then setting that to Musical Mode. But I’m confused about what to do with the Temp value in the Pool. Say I render a Guitar track that runs the entire song. At the start of that rendered file the tempo might be 122 but at the end it could be 130 - but the Pool seems to assume any audio is going to be a constant tempo throughout.

2

How did you set musical mode for the tracks?

3

I would embed the tempo information into freshly rendered tracks.
Turn off tempo tracks and set a tempo of the project at 125ish and have a listen.

4

You don’t - Musical Mode only applies to audio files.

On the Track it needs to be set to Musical Timebase not Linear Timebase. There is a button on the Track that toggles between the two Timebase settings.

5

Yeah, sounds like the next step.

When you say “embed” I assume you mean that the tempo changes are captured into the audio via rendering rather some other esoteric process.

6

Eureka! That worked.

Regarding my question above about what tempo a file gets set to when the tempo varies throughout it. It seems the Pool sets it to the average tempo over the course of the file.

7

I know - thats what I meant musical mode and audio files.