Is Aligning Beats Really This Complex?

[mhschmieder]

As I'm still having trouble with songs where there's a long intro before the drums come in, as well as ones with breaks in the drums, I found another way to skin the cat that will probably be my preferred methodology from now on, thanks to some recent advice from forum gurus:

http://www.motunation.com/forum/viewtop ... on#p388134

I think I had forgotten about this function because I couldn't use it on my old computer with reasonable enough latency to get tight timing.

At any rate, Record Beats seems the best way to go for creating a tempo map of a standard audio-based session of live musicians, for most pop/rock contexts (I'm not sure it would apply as well across the board, but it would probably especially be useful in jazz vs. other approaches).

[mhschmieder]

Unfortunately, I'm running into a show-stopper of a problem with Record Beats, and I'm betting I encountered this problem before and that it's why I ended up not using it.

Everything is fine except the first beat -- wherever it is asked to be -- that the Record Beats function enters prior to your first tap.

For some reason, that first beat is always given a tempo of somewhere between 1/6 and 1/7 of the actual tempo.

This creates all sorts of problems in trying to align the audio with beat one of bar three and give two full bars of count-in at initial tempo (for overdubs, etc.).

I've tried every trick in the book and am giving up for the night. Inserting, changing, or moving the pre-audio tempo settings does not help; it creates alignment issues between tracks.

I'm not willing to live with a starting tempo of around 27 bpm for a song at 180+ bpm!

Interestingly, no matter where I move this initial tempo setting that Record Beats inserts before the first tap, it has no effect -- all tracks remain aligned.

I guess if there's no tempo marking before the first one, DP searches for the first one and uses it until the next change. I hadn't noticed this as I'm so religious about placing tempo markings right at beat one in my MIDI projects. I thought it used the slider until a real tempo marking occurs, even if tempo is set to the conductor track.

Well, that's a red herring anyway, so isn't relevant to the problem. I was just hoping it would elucidate what is going on so that I could solve this issue and quickly make use of Record Beats in several projects.

If not for this glitch, which happens every time and even if I give different starting points, I would be perfectly happy with the results, which are spot on other than for the weird initial tempo that I can't change or get rid of without side effects (even though it's only for one beat).

I'll see if any of my other DP material describes this better -- I have always felt the DP manual is deficient in this one area of functionality, given the aforementioned discrepancies between pictures and words and the inconsistent and conflictive terminology.

[mhschmieder]

I tried one last thing, which was to undo everything then set a tempo on the first beat that is close to the average. Then I dragged all the audio tracks so that the first impulse landed on the first beat of bar three at this tempo, merged all audio tracks so that they were all contiguous starting at the zero point, and then redid Record Beats.

The same thing happened as before, so it doesn't seem to matter if you've already set an initial tempo -- even if it is close to the starting tempo.

I updated to the latest Snow Leopard and DP updates last week, and Repaired Permissions etc. I do hope that my struggles with this functionality are just pilot error and not a bug or incompatibility.

[mhschmieder]

OK, I have my answer, and it's a hack and not how the function was intended, but will get me where I need to be in two steps vs. one or vs. some horrendous workaround.

By taking the steps I mentioned above, I now have a reasonable (though hard to match from eye-to-ear-or-finger) in-tempo marking of the first beat of audio at bar 3 beat 1.

Thus, I can ignore the "OK is first beat" option and go straight to the "tap is first beat" option, being careful to land as precisely as I can on the downbeat when the green progress bar hits the intro marker after the count-in (beat one of bar three).

If I'm off, I can always use other tools to align the very first beat in the Sequence Editor (e.g.).

This approach avoids the anomaly of the weird useless initial tempo that causes downstream headaches. It will do as a patch for now, but I'd still like to know if the other approach is actually supposed to generate useful results.

[Michael Canavan]

I am baffled by how unintuitive and convoluted Beat Detection is. There is no ability to drag individual beats around in a file etc. it seems to be all up to the quantization method you use. I've mostly ended up using Strip Silence and dragging in the Sequence Editor to fix timing issues in DP. Hopefully DP8 takes care of this, as I do see it as a serious shortcoming in DP. In Live and Logic, it's all really pretty straightforward and easy. DP IMO has the ability to maybe beat them all if the time is spent getting it up to par. For the record though it's only Logic 9 that has easy beat quantizing etc. earlier versions were much worse than Beat Detection.
Live of course beats all with this feature, so mostly I use live for this stuff, I'm just under the impression that if MOTU added Live like audio time stretching features to DP they would go with the best algorithm they could use, and it would definitely make finalizing a song in DP that much quicker to not have to use another program to fix timing issues, for me anyway this is mainly MIDI slop on heavily quantized sequences from older synths with sloppy attacks.

[mhschmieder]

Now that I have completed adding tempo markings for the four songs that had live drums, I'll share the full process that seems to be the only foolproof way to avoid unexpected side effects -- though there are probably other ways, such as locking files.

1. Turn off auto analysis for the duration of these actions
2. Do a quick test run of Record Beats near the beginning, to get a rough guess average
3. Note this tempo on paper but DO NOT ENTER IT into the Conductor Track yet (VERY IMPORTANT!)
4. Select all tracks and shift until the initial impulse lines up with beat one of bar three
5. Record a brief moment of silence at the start of each audio track
6. Merge Audio for all tracks, so that there are no gaps at the beginning or elsewhere
7. Listen to all tracks to make sure they are still aligned on playback (UNDO otherwise)
8. Re-examine all tracks to make sure the first impulse is still aligned with beat one of bar three
9. Now it is safe to Record Beats using "Tap is first beat" and "Shift data to measure 3 beat 1"
10. Use the bar lines in DP to guide your two-nar count-in, then tap until the very end

This technique works around Beat Detection and manually enters beats, which works better for cases that have unsteady or unstable tempo, intros/links/pauses, etc.

Adjust as needed, if you should have a pickup note or two (set the "shift data to" and your starting tap entry earlier in this case) or if you need three bars of count-in.

For disco, electronica, anything with a steady tempo, Beat Detection might still be a better approach, as quantizing is probably more critical and lining up the beats in the Sequence Editor is more critical.

This particular drummer was about the sloppiest I have ever worked with, so I saw no point in taking extra time afterwards to drag the bar lines, as I had done with another project earlier this weekend. I just wanted it to be easier to do some overdubs using VI's with MIDI triggering (so I can listen to all parts at once using a high buffer and then re-track afterwards). Also, I like my projects to have clear markers for verse, chorus, bridge, etc.

I might give Ableton Live another try, as a free light copy came with my Alesis Q25 desktop controller that I'm now using for quick and simple VI-based overdubs. I don't mind using an otherwise-redundant app just for one feature that it's particularly good for. But I nearly had a nervous breakdown when I tried to wrap my head around an earlier demo that came with my Korg padKontrol, probably 4-5 years ago.

[lgonz]

I have been "forced" (well, not really "forced", since I am getting paid for it!) to get familiar with Pro Tools 9, and I am finding really nice features on it, particularly elastic audio. It is really effective for getting rhythmic stuff working properly, and fairly easy to setup. This morning I applied elastic audio to a vocal track as well as acoustic guitar that were not quite tight enough, and I got fairly good results very quickly (everything was recorded to click track, but still, the performances were not the best). You can manually drag audio within the soundfile until it snaps to the grid, just like quantizing MIDI. I know you can quantize audio in DP, but afaik you cannot manually drag the beats inside the audio file.

I wish something like elastic audio was implemented in DP. I think DP has all going for it in this department since it has always have very strong conversion algos in terms of time and pitch, it just needs an easier approach in order to accomplish time adjustment within tracks. (maybe there is an easier way, but I do not know it!)

Luis Gonzalez


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[mhschmieder]

I think the functionality is there, but maybe not as direct. Whereas Logic simply doesn't have as deep support for these sorts of features as DP. It's likely that PT goes a bit deeper or is a bit more direct for this sort of stuff, as it's its forte.

I don't really have direct hands-on experience with PT, but did suffer some horrendous editing in some well-paid sessions a few years back when the engineer/producer didn't understand the concept of a bass/drum "pocket" and sapped all of the life, energy and tension out of my carefully constructed bass lines using PT. It turned me against "elastic audio" for years.

Now that I am the engineer/producer (and often the player), I can see it was just the right tool in the wrong hands.

[Shooshie]

I am baffled by how unintuitive and convoluted Beat Detection is. There is no ability to drag individual beats around in a file etc. it seems to be all up to the quantization method you use.

Menu: Project/Change Conductor Track/Adjust Beats.

That's the best beat-adjusting feature on any DAW that I've seen. It includes the very important option of preserving the original performance, so that adjusting beats becomes a notational exercise. Of course, you can turn that off if you really want to move the beats. It takes some practice to get to know how it all works. There are many options, and in the course of fixing an entire sequence, I use several of those options, depending on the context of each move.

Shoosh

[XA]

hi shooshie and all of you
I reply to this post even if I read a lot of posts about Record Beats and Adjust Beats and maybe I should open a new discussion...

anyway my question is this:
if you ever tried to use adjust beats (with preserve performance) to create a tempo map that follows an audio recording of a free live performance, you should have noticed that the waveforms (and the real-time ruler by the way) are *visually* stretched (audio of course is NOT touched); in the meantime bars of different bpm *look* all of the same length AND the wiper is changing his speed running and slowing down following the tempo...

well... I think this is counter-intuitive: what I'm doing here is I am moving bar lines to adapt the tempo map to my recording but what I see is my precious waveforms stretched and the bars look all of identical length

for example: how am I supposed to do a sample-accurate edit to a waveform that has been visually stretched?!?

is there a way to avoid this visual stretching?

maybe it's me but I think there should be an option to disable this...

thanks a lot
xa

[bayswater]

In what sense has the waveform been visually stretched? (assuming all you've done is move musical points to specific beats in the waveform) All that happens is that the wiper moves across it at different speeds depending on how fast the tempo is at any particular point. The waveform itself shouldn't have changed, and editing it should work exactly as it did before.

[Michael Canavan]

I am baffled by how unintuitive and convoluted Beat Detection is. There is no ability to drag individual beats around in a file etc. it seems to be all up to the quantization method you use.

Menu: Project/Change Conductor Track/Adjust Beats.

That's the best beat-adjusting feature on any DAW that I've seen. It includes the very important option of preserving the original performance, so that adjusting beats becomes a notational exercise. Of course, you can turn that off if you really want to move the beats. It takes some practice to get to know how it all works. There are many options, and in the course of fixing an entire sequence, I use several of those options, depending on the context of each move.

Shoosh

You're talking about adjusting the tempo to match the beats, which is a unique feature of DP for sure. I'm talking about adjusting the audio file. A simple example is how it works in Live. In DP you have no ability to adjust an individual hit/bassline whatever audio file to match the measures in DP except for to allow DP to do it for you,which only really works in my experience on very straightforward audio files.
An example is a track from an old analog synth recorded into MIDI heavily quantized, very straightforward, though some MIDI jitter was evident to my drummer. Trying to import this into DP at the tempo it was recorded at, having DP analyze it and letting DP try to fix it caused more irregularities in timing than it fixed. In Live I can grab the beat detected 'hit' bars and drag a beat forward or backward along the timeline to adjust. In DP you have to let DP do it, and hope that the planets are in alignment and the gods are happy that day.
I suppose that had the original track been recorded in DP that DP would have had an easier time, but it's still a bad implementation of time adjusting beats compared to Live, and it really doesn't seem to me that it would be that hard for them to add to it a bit and get it on par with Live etc. Of course as it stands I use the right tool for the right job etc. but it would be cool if DP's implementation wasn't so awkward.

[bayswater]

Adjusting beats (without altering the audio) is certainly not unique to DP. Cubase has had this for a very long time. It draws proposed lines linking beats in the audio file to recurring points in the conductor -- every quarter note, whole note, etc. You can move the points on both the conductor and the audio file and redraw the lines. While this is essentially what DP does, the interface is easier to work with and you have the option of telling it which specific beats and musical points should be connected. Like DP, Cubase still won't help with audio that is not musically coherent in the first place.