bitflipper
I've never verified this, but I was told once that a person's heart rate will attempt to match the tempo of music.
 
It does make some intuitive sense, given that we listen to slow tempos to relax, and that extremely fast tempos are most popular with teenagers who have energy to burn. But why the popularity of 120 bpm? Seems like an uncomfortably high target unless you're at the gym.
 
Here's an article about a study showing the relationship between music and heart rate: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Healthday/story?id=7902380
 

Here's another one Dave 

Sanderxpander
And I also completely disagree that click tracks are inherently bad. I understand the idea is that you should be able to hold a groove without a metronome,

All the DAWs seemed to be designed around the premise that everything builds upward from a click track, so if a person is composing is a DAW, I don't know that there is a realistic alternative to using the click track.  But at least there is a tempo map available so a person can use that to simulate something that sounds more like natural music.

Jeff Evans
If you import files from outside Studio One you do not have to stretch them manually at all. They do not need any special tempo info embedded in them either.  All you have to do is simply figure out what the tempo is of any external imported files (which you may know anyway) and simply let Studio One know that info.  The moment you do that the files stretch to the session tempo and to any other tempo changes as required.  When you import a file that does not have any tempo info in it when you look at that track and its inspector you will see the words 'Not Set' in the tempo window.  That is where you add the tempo info and once you do that it will respond immediately.

Jeff, I tried to do this with a project again, and it didn't work. I did the "type tempo for 'Not Set'" box and all that. The file could stretch to the current tempo, but if I changed tempo, nothing happened. I had shown this to someone at PreSonuSphere when I was doing a seminar there on signal processing, and he confirmed that it didn't work but he didn't know why.
 
HOWEVER! I found out what the problem was. When you create a song, on the very first screen you must check "Stretch Audio Files to Song Tempo." I created a test project with that checked, and everything worked as you described. I created another test project without that checked, and had the issues detailed above.
 
The problem occurred for me because the setting for that check box persists from song to song. I had turned it off a long time ago for a couple specific songs where I didn't want to stretch tempo, and missed turning it back on again.
 
With that mystery solved, I then I thought I'd compare quality. I did a stretch from 84 to 95 BPM in PS1, another in Sound Forge 10, and then Sonar. The sound quality in Sound Forge and PS1 was very good (I couldn't tell any difference between the two), even in real time, although doing offline rendering in Sonar did produce better results. The main difference was less frequency response alteration (wasn't expecting that) and the timing accuracy seemed better.
 
In the process of comparing, though, I discovered something EXTREMELY cool. I put the two tracks side by side and used exclusive solo to switch between them. But when I played them both together, there was an amazing swirling sound caused by the differences in the algorithms. It's sort of like flanging, but more out of control. I can hardly wait to use this on drums!!!! It's one of the first "new" effects I've heard in years and it rocks. Try it!
 
 
 
 

cparmerlee

Metronomes and tuners are for people who want to be musicians someday.  Musicians don't need them.
 

Don't agree - at least about metronomes.  Metronomes can be a valuable practice tool.  When learning a technically challenging passage, forcing yourself to play to a slow beat is a good way to learn the fingerings (at least on a keyboard).  Recording a performance to them ... well, no argument there.

dmbaer

cparmerlee

Metronomes and tuners are for people who want to be musicians someday.  Musicians don't need them.
 

Don't agree - at least about metronomes.  Metronomes can be a valuable practice tool.  When learning a technically challenging passage, forcing yourself to play to a slow beat is a good way to learn the fingerings (at least on a keyboard).  Recording a performance to them ... well, no argument there.

I think we are in 100% agreement.  I often practice with a metronome.  I do that so that I can keep excellent time when playing live music in ensemble.  For most people, time doesn't just happen any more than pitch happens.  Both are skills that come from careful practice.  (And the access to advanced recording capabilities at very low cost really revolutionizes how one can practice these skills, but that's a subject for another thread another day.)
 
What I was referring to is the evolution, especially in pop music, to recording everything to a click track.  Some styles (euro Tek or the Gangnam style thing e.g.) are intentionally robotic, and that is a matter of acquired taste I suppose.  But I believe much, if not most, of the elegance and emotional grip of the most beautiful music comes from flexibility in time and nuance in pitch.
 
When I go back and listen to the hits from the 70s and earlier, it really is shocking just how much more depth there was to much of that music because it wasn't so robotic.  I heard Johnny Matthis in a radio interview recently talk about how most of his recordings were done on one take, or two at the most.  The label wouldn't budget any more studio time than that.  Yet the music was brilliantly done.  I was never really a big Johnny Matthis fan before, but now I have a huge respect for him and all the others who were (and are) such exquisite musicians.
 
I learned something from this thread about how to use tempo maps in a new way so that naturally flowing music can more easily be integrates with the DAW.  My "to do" list now includes learning a lot more about Audiosnap.

I think the click track is catching a lot of undue flak in this thread. I completely agree that music should sound naturally flowing (assuming that is what the style requires). But it's not the actual slow downs and speed ups that make the music sound natural (and if it was, it's super easy to program them into a DAW), it's that the musician is "selling" you HIS sense of time. It has to sound as if HE is determining the tempo. That is entirely possible to do even when playing with a click. In many styles the drummer is trying to play as tight as possible anyway, and the rest of the musicians are "aiming" for the drummer usually. So nothing changes as long as the drummer can really internalize the click and not sound as if he is constantly correcting to it.

MakeShift
I still learn something new every day with this software.  Craig, I didn't even know you could do time stretching this way while holding the ctrl key down and dragging by the top corner on the end of the song.  Very cool.  Much easier than how I was doing this in the past.

It's also an easy way to create loops that conform to tempo if you don't want to do the full acidization thing.

slartabartfast
There is an internal clock in the brain...

 
Drat! Mine's always running behind!

i don't want to confuse things here but sometimes, when the drums are NOT in the POCKET (behind the pocket)... a song can sound like it drags... just changing the drums to be slightly out of pocket (pushing the rhythm) can do the same thing as speeding up the song. :-)
 
JK

chuckebaby
the same can be said for slowing a piece down as well.
just a few seconds.
 
you can hear a lot more in a song with a slower tempo than a song with a faster tempo
this does not apply to all situations but I think you know what I mean.

We had a song a couple of years ago which just felt wrong, tempo-wise.
So I slowed it down a bit and everyone who heard it said wow! what have you done to it?

So...here's how the song I was working on resolved itself.
 
Ultimately I split the choruses and verses, and sped up the verses by 2% but left the choruses unaltered. What I find interesting is that when I play the entire song, it doesn't sound like the tempo changes at all. When I post the tune on YouTube in a day or two, I'll put a link here so you can tell me whether I'm crazy or not.