Please give me some advise!

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larry hardig jr
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2015/07/03 16:47:14 (permalink)

Please give me some advise!

I have a project I have been working on for 6 months.
It has 27 tracks.
When I first started the song I accidently started it at 120 BPM.
I just realized why nothing was lining up.
I need to make the BPM 217.
What is the correct way to advance the BPM and keep all the tracks lined up to one another, although I may have to reline all the tracks with the timeline.
I do thank you very much for any advise and have a great weekend. :D
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    Gone!!
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    Re: Please give me some advise! 2015/07/03 17:21:30 (permalink)
    I think This may help you, I find it works quite well.
     
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    Anderton
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    Re: Please give me some advise! 2015/07/03 17:34:25 (permalink)
    larry hardig jr
    I have a project I have been working on for 6 months.
    It has 27 tracks.
    When I first started the song I accidently started it at 120 BPM.
    I just realized why nothing was lining up.
    I need to make the BPM 217.
    What is the correct way to advance the BPM and keep all the tracks lined up to one another, although I may have to reline all the tracks with the timeline.
    I do thank you very much for any advise and have a great weekend. :D



    In addition to the tip referenced above, are you dealing with MIDI, audio, or both? The correct solution depends on which you're using.
     
    Also, is the issue that you want to maintain the same tempo you recorded but have everything line up with measure lines as if you had recorded at 217, or did you really record at half the speed you wanted to use? If the former, it's easy assuming the tempo is constant. I describe the process in an article about collaboration. But if you want to stretch audio from 120 to 217, that's asking a lot...
     
    Can you provide more details?

    The first 3 books in "The Musician's Guide to Home Recording" series are available from Hal Leonard and http://www.reverb.com. Listen to my music on http://www.YouTube.com/thecraiganderton, and visit http://www.craiganderton.com. Thanks!
    #3
    larry hardig jr
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    Re: Please give me some advise! 2015/07/03 20:15:33 (permalink)
    "jih64" - Thank you very much!
    "Anderton" - Thank you too!
    The song is actually all audio. I went online and found a drum and bass being played for the song, "Dirty Women" by black sabbath. My son wanted to play the guitar part rhythm, so I learned it and taught him.
    It seems to me in the beginning I looked up the song and the information I got was the song tempo was original 120 BPM. That's why I started my project in that tempo. Just the other day I dissected a portion of the original song by black sabbath and I came up with a tempo of 217 BPM. The drum and bass I got online of the song, I dissected a portion and came up with 214 BPM. So all along everything I have ever recorded has been to the tempo of 214 BPM. So actually I first mentioned 217 but Im trying to change my tempo to 214 so I can use the bass and drum and get things to match up perfectly on the time line. I hope this explains everything a bit better for you. I will go and read over the article that jih64 posted for me, which I see was originally posted by you Anderton. lol! Thanks for all the help you both have provided. I do appreciate it very much. So yes I'm working with audio that is not stretchable I'm thinking but was originally recorded to a bass and drum beat that was created to a 214 BPM tempo, and my project was just originally set to a 120 BPM tempo template.
    I hope there is an easy answer to my problem.
    Have a great day guys and thank you very much. :)
    #4
    slartabartfast
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    Re: Please give me some advise! 2015/07/03 21:20:34 (permalink)
    If the bass and drum is audio like the rest of the project, and your project when you play it in Sonar does not sound like it is being played at half of your intended speed (d-o-e-s i-t t-a-k-e  t-w-i-c-e a-s l-o-n-g t-o p-l-a-y b-a-c-k a-s t-h-e o-r-i-g-i-n-a-l?) then you just need to stretch the audio. The Sonar tempo setting is pretty much irrelevant. If your own recorded tracks are roughly at the right speed but are wandering relative to the borrowed bass, then it is much more problematic. Audiosnap. Next time try recording with the borrowed base line playing in your headphones and use that groove. 
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    mudgel
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    Re: Please give me some advise! 2015/07/04 04:49:17 (permalink)
    I don't know any rock band that could have kept up that tempo. ie. 217.

    It was likely half that ie. 108/109

    It's all in what you count and it sounds like your counting double tempo. Not meaning you literally but the way you've got Sonar setup and how you derive the information.

    217 = 217 beats per minute or more than 3.5 beats per second. Which is very very fast. Forget the 120 BPM which is what Sonar's metronome default to and accounts for the bar spacing vs the timeline in the track window. Thiose visual cues are meaningless when you insert a piece of audio as you have done.
    post edited by mudgel - 2015/07/04 05:05:38

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    #6
    larry hardig jr
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    Re: Please give me some advise! 2015/07/04 07:48:03 (permalink)
    How I arrived with the tempo 217BPM was I dissected 4 bars out of the song and inserted it in a program called, "Recycle" by Propellerhead. I too thought 217 was tremendously high. Maybe I'm going about it all wrong. Maybe I should count beats for 15 secs and times that by 4, to arrive at the tempo.
    As far as wandering as "slartabartfast" suggested, nothing in the song wanders. Things are precise. No dragging, no nothing.
    "Those visual cues are meaningless when you insert a piece of audio as you have done. <-- mudgel said
    However, when one is using a part of a prerecorded song as I have done, you still have to determine the tempo of the inserted piece so it matches the timeline for dissecting, pieces and parts, where as I'm a guitar player.
    I can say this though, If I start a new project and set the tempo to 214BPM everything I created including the prerecorded bass and drums match up perfectly with the timeline and I am able to dissect everything precisely on the correct measures. Meaning I would have to export every track from the 120BPM project and import to the 214BPM project, 27 times. I was just hoping there was a faster way of doing it because a lot of tracks are dissected with fade ins and outs and I've used v-vocal a bit.
    I simply would like to change the tempo and keep the tracks as are so I can finish completing them only at the new tempo. Maybe I'm going about it all wrong. I don't know. That's why I came here and asked all of you who are more advanced with the program.
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    slartabartfast
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    Re: Please give me some advise! 2015/07/04 12:45:54 (permalink)
    Look, tempo is a musical concept, and finding the beat is a human cognitive exercise. A computer program cannot "feel the beat," but it can search for changes in volume, and look for repetitive patterns over time to extact a best guess about what the tempo might be. That works best if the changes are sudden and brief (transients) and very regular, which is why programs that do this work best with things like drum tracks, and not very well with extended pads or string sections. Yes, you should count the beat with your brain when the computer is obviously wrong.
     
    If all of the beats of the all of the tracks of your own recorded music line up with each other, they are in synch relative to each other. If there is some variation of the recorded beats from the metronome beats they are "drifting" or "wandering" relative to the metronome. If the beats can all be synchronized to the metronome they are "on the beat," and "in time." If the beats do not all line up with the metronome, but they can be sychronized to the metronome by changing the tempo of the metronome, they are on the beat, but fast or slow relative to the tempo/time--"off time." In that case they will be "drifting" relative to the metronome and each sucessive beat will gradually be getting further from the metronome beat it should land on. If it is impossible to sychonize the beat to the metronome at any speed they are "wandering" relative to the metronome and they are off beat. It is actually not unusual for human performances to not line up with the metronome. Gradual changes in tempo, or holding or rushing one or a few beats at a time are part of the musical expression of a piece, or just human error. But if they do stay on beat, it makes your problem easier.

    If both of a set of tracks that do not line up with each other still line up with the metronome/click track but only when the metronome is at a different "tempo" for some of the tracks (they are invariably on the beat), then the non-aligned tracks have the property that there is a fixed ratio between the beats/music delivered per second in the one to the other. In that case a "stretch" algorithm that lengthens the one at the faster tempo (or shortens the slower one) and distributes the additional time equally along the track can bring them into exact alignment a whole track at a time.
     
    If there is beat to beat variation within the track (off beat) then stretching the whole track will not bring the beats into synch with either the metronome or another track that is on the beat or is  off beat on different beats. You still need to perform a stretch, but you have to do it on a smaller chunk of the track at a time, often a single beat or less if you are really anal about lining things up. There are ways to automate parts of that task, and one of the least labor intensive for the quality of the result is the Audiosnap plugin. It is still nowhere near as simple as changing the "tempo," and for a skilled performer nowhere near as fast as recording another take. Ask someone else how to do that, I work almost exclusively in MIDI.
     
    Now as to the "tempo" in Sonar, and in MIDI in general. MIDI tempo is not musical tempo, it is simply an alias for real time that is useful for relating notated musical onset and duration with actual control of a musical performance. A human performance on a MIDI controller is actually a recording of the real time (not the musical time) at which an instrument should sound quantized to ticks per quarter note at the rate of the quarter notes per minute set as the MIDI tempo. Unless the performer is perfectly in time with a synchronized metronome or some type of quantization is applied it will not sit on a particular quarter note division boundary any more than the sound of a wood and wire piano hammer will sit perfectly on the beat. But because MIDI tempo directly relates to the time, and there is no complicated DSP gymnastics needed to move a note-on it is easier to design a computer algorithm to fix problems with time in MIDI. If you want to keep the same expressive options of moving off the beat or changing tempo beat to beat however, instead of just jamming everything onto the nearest note division, it is still not as simple as just changing the tempo to line up two tracks that are not perfectly on the beat with each other.
     
    At any rate, since Sonar's tempo setting just controls the MIDI clock (actually the number of quarter notes/ticks per minute), changing the Sonar tempo will have no effect on recorded audio, which is controlled by a clock that reads in digital samples per second and does not relate either to the musical beat or tempo. You can import or export at different tempo or change the tempo in Sonar to anything you want and the asynchronous audio tracks will not change their recorded tempo at all unless they are set up with another technique that automatically stretches to tempo like groove clips. And  then they will only align perfectly if the two are perfectly on beat in their original tempo.
     
    NB: This is pretty much what I said in my previous post, but hopefully the expanded version will make more sense to you. 
    post edited by slartabartfast - 2015/07/04 14:29:05
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    Zargg
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    Re: Please give me some advise! 2015/07/04 13:20:09 (permalink)
    This may be of no help, but as a die hard Black Sabbath fan, I do not think any of (their old) songs were near 217 bpm. I believe that the advice you got, "halfing" the bpm would be right. How to devide tempo in half, someone else will be able to help you better.
    Best of luck.

    Ken Nilsen
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    Brightside
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    Re: Please give me some advise! 2015/07/04 13:36:47 (permalink)
    I'm not sure how to help you with the alignment, but the correct tempo of that song is 112bpm.

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    charlyg
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    Re: Please give me some advise! 2015/07/04 13:43:40 (permalink)
    A few months ago, when I first attempted to match a tune to bpm, I started out twice as fast. Then I started to think about drumming, and how everything is divisible. I can count the eighth or16th notes, but that ain't the bpm. As soon as I got in the ballpark, I started feeling, for lack of a better word, the pulse of the tune. I relate that pulse to the bpm, which, so far, been right on. I'm thinking I will be told if I am mistaken......

     
     
    #11
    slartabartfast
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    Re: Please give me some advise! 2015/07/04 14:45:53 (permalink)
    As a practical matter, if you believe the different audio projects are exactly on the beat, you should be able to just import the borrowed drum and bass into your project and slip stretch the imported audio until it lines up with the rest of the project. If it does line up you are done. If not...
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    Zargg
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    Re: Please give me some advise! 2015/07/04 16:21:56 (permalink)
    Hi, again. Do you count 16th, or 4th? Maybe it would make a difference? (1234, or 1,2,3,4).
    Anyways, best of luck.

    Ken Nilsen
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    #13
    larry hardig jr
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    Re: Please give me some advise! 2015/07/05 09:04:41 (permalink)
    "slartabartfast" - That was an in depth explanation. Thank you very much. You should be a Music Teacher of some sort. :)
    "Zargg71" - Thanks for your comment. :)
    "Brightside" - Thanks for the correct tempo. :)
    "charlyg" - Thanks! :)
    To all, Have a great day and remember it is people like yourselves that make it a pleasure to be part of this music community. Stay positive and Thank you very much, once again. :)
    #14
    mudgel
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    Re: Please give me some advise! 2015/07/05 10:29:30 (permalink)
    Funny that's what I said.

    Mike V. (MUDGEL)

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    Cactus Music
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    Re: Please give me some advise! 2015/07/05 10:52:38 (permalink)
    I record our band live all the time and we don't use a click track. 
    So the songs are all at 120 by default. 
    Later if I wish to muck with stuff I might try and match the tempo so I just change it. 
    Audio tracks do not change with the tempo, only midi. 
    Therefore you should be able to just change the project from 120 to 112? . But if those original bed tracks drifted around then it gets more complicated and that is an area I have never ventured into. I beleive you can extract a tempo somehow. 
    But I have my own old backing tracks that are audio and they will match up perfectly if I keep adjusting th etempo. 
    I use the count in and line it up to the grid. It normally results in a 144.25 BPM 
    post edited by Cactus Music - 2015/07/05 11:01:19

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