So after much searching I was dissapointed to find out it’s not possible to record automation for track delay , by that I mean, adjust the track delay in milliseconds gradually over the course of 3 mins and have cubase record that automation to a separate track.
Is there a workaround for this?
Or better still, is there a plugin that will allow me to set ‘track delay start time’ and ‘track delay end time’ (in milliseconds) to automatically adjust the track delay for a specific audio track over time, leaving both tracks in sync instead of one ending up 0.2 seconds out.
Please note, this needs to be accomplished without the use of any timestretching effects , as this will stop the ‘invert phase’ and audio cancelling technique from working.
I have to admit, I’m very curious why you aren’t using a Flanger to achieve this sonic effect. - It would seem to give you much easier precision control over the intensity of the effect.
Hi Nico, the reason is I wasn’t trying to create a flanging effect, i was doing a ‘phase inversion acapella’. I had an instrumental mix and I vocal mix (no acapella). By phase inverting one of the tracks and playing them at the same time, anything identical in both tracks is cancelled out leaving me with just the vocal which I wanted. The problem was the instrumental track was running a fraction faster than the vocal mix track, so an unwanted flanging effect would start to occur, by slowly adding time delay (milliseconds) as the track progressed it kept the two perfectly in sync, cancelling out the music and providing me with a clean acapella, which it did successfully. Hope that satisfies your curiosity?
@seanbrennan
Thank you so much for entertaining my curiosity! I appreciate that very much! And I’m happy to hear that your approach worked for what you wanted to achieve. – Over the years I’ve also done a little audio restoration stuff, sometimes to preserve history, and at other times for remixing/producing.
So I find that a very cool story, and the context of your original question makes so much more sense now.
Are you into blog posting at all? If yes, it would be a really cool story to capture somewhere. And I would love to link to it from my own little - slowly evolving blog.
And in that context, I’m curious if you know (or have a theory) how the two recordings you had to work with ended up being of slightly different tempo, given they came from the same recording session?
And in at least two different scenarios I’ve encountered myself, a different tempo also implied a different pitch, either via tape stretch (in the analog world) or via tiny sample rate differences (in the digital domain). So was a pitch difference also a problem in your case, or was there a different reason for the tiny tempo drift between the 2 tracks?
Thanks again for entertaining my curiosity - it’s a very cool story!
Additional thoughts after experimenting a bit more:
One of the issues with modulating the delay time on a continuous audio signal is, that it may create audible artifacts while changing the delay time.
Because when you increase the delay time, you’re technically introducing gaps in the continuous audio stream. So when the delay plugin tries to compensate for that by extending the prior signal, this may create audible artifacts.
And when you decrease the delay time, you’re effectively ignoring some part of the incoming audio, creating a cut that may also become audible, even when the delay plugin tries to smooth it out.
And this problem of artifacts ( due to gaps and cuts) when changing delay times in mid stream is why modulating track delay in Cubase may not make that much sense and therefore can’t be automated.
So this is actually a much more difficult audio processing problem to solve than one might initially think, because you have to create some artificial audio. Either to fill in empty spaces or to smooth over cuts.