Other ways to quantize audio when Beat Detection won't work

[smashprod]

I have an audio file of acoustic guitar and vocal. It's pretty much at a constant tempo but not rock-solid. The vocal is too loud and the guitar too busy for me to use beat detection. I want to straighten out the tempo of this track so I can use it as a guide to overdub to (the vocal and guitar will eventually be replaced). I don't care about the audio quality, just that the tempo is metronomic. What's the best way to do this in DP8? I wish there was a way I could use "Record Beats", automatically slice the file into one-beat regions, erase all the "Record Beats" tempo changes in the conductor track, quantize all the regions, stretch or shrink them as necessary, and finally consolidate the whole thing back into one region. At least is there a way to split regions on the fly during playback? Any ideas or experience with this??

[FMiguelez]

This is not the comprehensive solution you seek, but it might give you something to experiment with:
Open your file in the SE. Turn the grid on to quarter notes, or even eight notes. Press letter c and drag all across the soundbite. That will give you the slices you mentioned as fast as you can drag. You can then quantize this, bounce to disk and delete the slices afterwards. You said you didn't care about the quality...
I don't know if that will really work, though, even if you quantize (these slices won't match the timing of the out-of-tempo music).
I don't know if the Change Duration command would roughly extend the slices to fill the gaps. The manual would tell you that.

It would be much better to try to get the slices in MachFive or Recycle, so you can really slice accurately and have them extend as needed automatically. Long and tedious, but you could try this in a small sample to see if it will work before investing too much time on this. Quantizing the resulting slices should work much better this way.

And of course, the best would be the one you probably don't want to hear: Rerecord if possible.

[Michael Canavan]

You should still be able to use beat detection. You'll have to do some fine tuning on your own but it will work if you can hear a tempo in the music, so can DP. Mostly what I do is use beat detection, then adjust the tempo manually to as close as I can get it then have DP adjust the tempo. Basically give DP the least amount of work to do.

[smashprod]

You should still be able to use beat detection. You'll have to do some fine tuning on your own but it will work if you can hear a tempo in the music, so can DP. Mostly what I do is use beat detection, then adjust the tempo manually to as close as I can get it then have DP adjust the tempo.

Not sure if I understand about adjusting the tempo. I've been using beat detection to analyze the audio, then using "adjust soundbytes to sequence tempo".

[Tesionman]

You can use the slip tool. It works great!

check this video out at about the 5min mark. Its not DP but you can do the same using DP's slip tool.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3YsWickhRk

cheers

[smashprod]

This kind of slip-editing might work If there is a quick way that I can slice the region every four bars Then after I slip-edit if I could time-compress or time- expand each region to fit. I know I'm getting into RTFM here, please excuse me ...

[smashprod]

OK, I opened the manual. Scissors tool to cut on a grid; Slip tool to get the start right; stretch/compress audio with the Grabber. Unless someone's got a better idea (maybe slicing and slipping, THEN using beat detection??), I'll try this.

[David Polich]

Melodyne will do it. Of course it's pricey but IMO it's a must-have. I've
used it to do exactly what you want to do - fix the timing of an acoustic
guitar track.

Downloadable time-limited demo available here:

http://www.celemony.com

[smashprod]

I have Melodyne, I could use that, true.

But I finally got good results. First, I went back to Beat Detective and fiddled some more with the sensitivity, and finally got a big chunk of the song pretty good. For the part that wasn't I used my other technique of using the Scissors and the Grabber. I now have something usable. Thanks all!

[Shooshie]

Adjust Beats is a method of tempo mapping when the audio simply doesn't give the software a lot of clues as to where to put the beats. Assuming that YOU can tell where the beats are, or at least where the downbeats are, Adjust Beats can actually go pretty quickly when you get the hang of it.

There's a video of it on about the 5th page of the DP Tips Sheet thread. I apologize for the audio drift; it's pretty crappy video/audio when you can't tell what's going on, because the audio and video are not synched. I should redo that video, but I think others have already done it, so maybe there is no need.

The real key to getting beats in the right place, assuming you can find most of the down beats, is to use the Tempo markers in the Conductor Track to tell you when you've located the most likely place for the inner beats. That is, you put the down beats where they belong, then you try to move the inner beats until they are right. You'll know if you're way off, because the tempo markers will jump up inappropriately. When you've got the tempo markers just about leveled, but moving appropriately with what you perceive to be the changing tempo in the music, then you're on the right path.

So, use Adjust Beats, watch the notes and music in the actual tracks, but keep the Conductor Track open so that you can monitor how you're doing, tempo-wise.

Then there's the cutting-with-grid, or Slip Tool, and others as well.

Shooshie