Session Was Completely Ruined by Musical Mode Changes

Hey guys, I’m new to Cubase, and today my session was ruined by the music mode/linear features.

There’s a tempo change in the middle of the song, and so I took the tempo track and animated a jump from 130 up to 160. (not knowing about music mode at the time). As soon as I did this, the vocals slowed down and the drums no longer matched the metronome. (Perhaps musical mode was on for some tracks and not for others? Idk)

Plus, everything that was recorded at the new speed is completely messed up if I turn the “Activate Tempo Track” button off in the transport section. I’ve read up on musical mode vs. linear, and toggling them seems to make no difference in the slowed down speed of the vocals or the misaligned drum tracks.

Needless to say, I’m absolutely amazed at how much of a mess this has caused, and I have no idea how to fix things or ensure that my tracks are playing in the tempo that they were recorded in. In the pool window, I had some weird tempo numbers going on, so I set them to 130. Musical Mode is off on everything as well.

Can someone please point me in the right direction here? I had to stop the whole session early for everybody today because we couldn’t find anything that seemed to help the situation.

Thanks in advance

Without knowing the details about what you did or what the problem is, it’s hard to say what happened or how to fix it. But…I’m pretty sure you’re confusing musical mode and the track time base.

Are you saying you recorded audio at 130, then wanted to change the tempo to 160 and have the audio automatically speed up to match the new tempo? If so, you’ll need to have musical mode turned on for the audio in question. If you’re saying the audio was unchanged and didn’t follow the tempo jump to 160, then it sounds like musical mode was turned off.

Or are you saying the recorded audio already had the desired tempo change and you were just trying to change the tempo track to follow the tempo change in the audio? In that case you’ll want musical mode turned off. That way the tempo change won’t alter the audio.

The first thing you need to learn is the difference etween musical mode for clips and musical- / lineear timebase for tracks.
Musical mode is nothing that can be activated for tracks (as you wrote above) - that is track timebase.

Have you checked to see if there is a backup saved? Have you gone through the undo menu? When I’m making big changes I save as a new version just in case I mess up.

Super important lesson that most of us learn the hard way.

+1 above. I have learned the hard way too! One of the bac files should take you back to some time before you made the changes - found in the project folder. I hope.