Tightening up Gypsy Jazz Band, Aligning Audio Slow no beats

[tbrianmann]

Best tools for aligning audio? I've been recording my Gypsy Jazz Band, and find it useful to tighten our band a bit. I haven't been able to get find beats working or the last year, so I've been using strip silence, but that has been hit or miss for finding individual strums on the guitars. So I've wound up manually cutting each strum and then selecting and quantizing then fine tuning. I found that adding 20 ticks or so of positive offset helped it sound more natural. But,.......... it takes......... for...........ever.
What do you guys, gals use to do this kind of thing? I did my due diligence and searched first but couldn't find much. OK hope to hear from you.

Brian, the Accordion Guy.

[mikehalloran]

DP 9 has Precision Delay plugin for this purpose. I don't recall if DP 8 has it, too but I think it does.
http://motu.com/products/software/dp/plug-ins.html

I use Eventide Precision Time Align plug for the same thing because I like the interface but no reason why the MOTU plug shouldn't do exactly what you need.
https://www.eventideaudio.com/products/plugins

Melodyne Studio 4 has this functionality as well

[tbrianmann]

MIke, thank you I will check that out.

[HCMarkus]

Quantizing audio works pretty well for drums sometimes but, as you note, is unlikely to produce great results on guitar strums. When tightening tracks, I use my ears and eyes... things don't have to be perfect to sound good, but some players tend to push the beat (rush) in a semi-consistent way. In such cases, shifting an entire track settles the groove down. After getting the overall groove, if I find sections that rush or drag, I create a new region in that area of audio, then shift for feel using arrow keys.

Of course, the best answer is to have everyone play in the pocket, but sometimes a pocket can develop a hole...

[Shooshie]

Best way: tight gypsies.



Which reminds me: I used to manage one of the best Gypsy jazz bands I've ever heard: Cafe Noir. Those guys rocked in a way that brought back shades of Stefan Grapelli, Django, and their own mysterious quality, which I suppose was the "Noir" part. The bass player, whose name I will remember 30 minutes after posting this, was one of the best bassists I've heard. But the same could be said for all of them, at least in the personnel lineup they had when I was working with them. Incredible fun, and an honor to have been in any way affiliated with them.

Shoosh

Bass player: Lyles West. Told ya I'd remember it later.