Analyze beats question

[Timeline]

A friend sent me a vocal guitar track and I could not acquire beat info when selected. Tried different thresholds abut nothing. I was able to do a tap tempo on it and thought I might try a re-sync to steady the beat but was prevented because I could not gather beat info from the track. Any thoughts?

[BKK-OZ]

Good question.
I'm working on a remix for a mate and I am having the same issue, timing is all over the place.

I've ended up playing in a new drum track, and I'm slicing the vocals up to line them up with the new rhythm. Gotta be an easier way.

[bayswater]

I've done a lot of tracks where the tempo track is taken using beats from a freely recorded rhythm guitar, and it's always a lot of work. If you can record something like a hihat played along with the guitar it gets easier, but even then you'll end up doing a fair bit of Beat editing. I suggest you watch Magic Dave's Vimeo on this. That's about as good a guide as I've seen.

I found Logic Cubase and PT different but not any easier for this, so I don't think it's a DP thing, maybe just the inability of a machine to figure out a non machine generated tempo. Having said that, I do remember Freestyle, and it always seemed to be able to figure out beats and tempos a lot better.

[Timeline]

Right....
I had no problem putting up a drum track either.

It seems when you have prefs set to analyze it always draws in beats with any audio it sees but selecting it from the menu is different and fails to draw.

[bayswater]

Right....
I had no problem putting up a drum track either.

It seems when you have prefs set to analyze it always draws in beats with any audio it sees but selecting it from the menu is different and fails to draw.

Well, I don't think I'm seeing that problem. In fact, I usually go to the Wave editor and delete all the beat and tempo info in any audio file I'm using and then recreate it all from scratch.

[mikehalloran]

I've done a lot of tracks where the tempo track is taken using beats from a freely recorded rhythm guitar, and it's always a lot of work

I've never found a quick, easy way for that. At least, with a vocal, I can lay it on a track, use a bit of stretching and shrinking of sound bites as needed since perfect timing of a voice is boring anyway.

Free form rhythm guitar... you're braver than I am.

[bayswater]

Free form rhythm guitar... you're braver than I am.

Well, it's the thing I can do best, or least worst.

At first, I made the mistake of using the transients as beat points when the track sounded like it was played exactly on some imaginary beat, albeit with a varying tempo. I experimented creating a tempo track for the rhythm guitar in Atlantis by the Shadows. Bruce Welsh's playing sound perfect to me, so I tried to use the transients in that to set the tempo map. You end up with a tempo track that goes all over the place. You get the as much variation but in a different pattern if you use one of the drums. It takes some time to reconcile the way the tempo looks and the way it feels.

Maybe DP's beat detection is trying to do this reconciliation, and that's why it never seems to hit the transients the way you might expect, except in very simple robotic tracks.

I think you might get a reasonable approximation to a useful tempo map if the compress function could be used on the list of events in the tempo map when these are based on transients. The transients themselves seem to exaggerate tempo variation, regardless of how tight the playing sounds.

[magicd]

Tempo, feel, and note transients are three different things. On occasion the transients in audio are good representations of bar line downbeats, but that is often not the case at all.

I do a lot of work with musicians that don't play to click tracks. At the very least I like to have accurate barlines in DP, and there are plenty of occasions where I need to fix tempo or quantize something.

If you're dealing with a drummer playing a 4/4 beat, the kick drum usually shows you reasonably accurate downbeats. But there are plenty of examples where the downbeat is not obvious in terms of transients.

So if I don't get lucky with an obvious representation of downbeats, I create a click track to match the performance. I find that to be not so difficult. Set up a MIDI keyboard that triggers something like a cowbell or whatever. Record into a MIDI track and tap along with the music. Play the track back, listening to the newly recorded MIDI click against the audio performance. It will be obvious if the click is accurate. I find that when I do this I'm usually just behind the beat with my original MIDI click, so I may just advance the MIDI click notes a hair to get on top of the beat. It's easy enough to edit individual MIDI clicks to match the performance. The goal is to get to the point where the MIDI click is in time with the audio performance all the way through. You'll hear it when you've got it right.

Then, use the downbeats of the MIDI click to create your tempo map. I use the Adjust Beats feature with the snap to notes function engaged.

In my experience, it takes more time to describe the procedure than to actually do the job.

Dave

[BKK-OZ]

Useful info on adjust beats: http://www.motu.com/techsupport/technot ... just-beats

[bayswater]

I don't think this tells you much more than the manual. There are five MOTU videos on tempo on Vimeo. They are about as good an explanation as you can get.

[monkey man]

Thank you for chiming in, Dave.

Hope you're well.

[Basstrup]

I do this quite often. Usually record a "tap click" Track. Going through the steps and sometimes it works amazingly. Sometimes i have to adjust One beat -and then sometimes DP goes metal and set a tempo of 300+ bpm on the bar being adjusted - sometimes not. One time DP insisted on a perfect Half tempo of the recorded click. Even I have to do this on almost a daily basis, I still trying to understand how this work. Watching Magic Daves excellent videos on the matter is great inspiration. But still I have a lot of hit and more misses.

[tommymandel]

Thanks, Magic Dave! It's interesting to know you often get the best results by dealing in downbeats, rather than all beats, and by sliding your hand-made click track earlier a tad.
What I've noticed in my Tap Tempo aTtempts, is that if I missed a beat or rushed a beat in tapping, and I go into the Event Edit window for the Conductor track, and change one beat's tempo, I may have to go to the next beet, and parsnip a bit off of that, so that the 2 beats add up to the same total time they did previously - otherwise subsequent clicks will have been thrown 'out of time.'
Probably obvious, but just in case.

Magic Dave: use the Adjust Beats feature with the snap to notes function engaged.

- gotta try that too. Thanks again.