Workflow for Audio and Midi Multi-track

Nuendo
1

Hi there

I am new to this package although working 20 odd years with Pyramix and Sadie predominantly and a bit of Pro Tools. You therefore won’t be surprised to hear my work is classical music related. I have a project which involves recording stereo piano and mono soloist but the piano which is a Yamaha Disklavier is also putting out midi which we are capturing for use in APP to scroll a score and do other clever stuff. Consequently, I need to edit various takes together but have the midi and audio slip or chain in sync as I move the position of crossfades either in the timeline or ideally in the trim window such that the midi track reflects exactly the audio that was captured with it. What seems to happen is the cut where the crossfade is only related to the audio so the cut point on the midi track is static to where I roughly assembled the clips. If I extend the right hand side of the edit to make it later, it does not reveal any midi data from eariler - only midi silence which basically means I have a nine hour project which I might have to assemble twice - once for audio and once for midi and then they may not strictly speaking match each other. Can anybody think of a clever way around this?

Matt

2

Not sure I understand your process… are you working without sync to tempo? Are you moving the audio events independently of the MIDI parts?

  1. Presumably the audio and MIDI at the time of recording were in perfect sync?
  2. If they are in perfect sync are you then creating subtle shifts in the position of audio events on the timeline when you make a cut / do a crossfade?

If your answer to 2) is yes then of course the audio will no longer match the MIDI notes. You could try always moving the material in a locked pair of audio+MIDI parts where the edit point is always firstly dictated by the onset of a note or notes in the MIDI parts and not by the audio. Audio crossfades could then be applied as a function of where the MIDI edit points are located. Any shifts of audio events along the timeline should always be locked to the corresponding MIDI parts which are then shifted by the exact same amount to remain in sync. But you may already be doing all this…

That’s right. MIDI editing is not audio editing so when you cut a MIDI part you really are cutting the data.