Is there a way for Sonar to find the tempo of a song? Say there's guitar and vocals only. No click track or beat to it, but you want to go back and add a drum track. How would you manage to find the tempo to do so?

I think it's explained in here:
http://www.cakewalk.com/D...help=AudioSnap.06.html

The bigger problem is when the folks recording the tracks did not use a click...and tend to drift in tempo..... straight up midi won't work for laying down drums.
 
Just a quick glance through of the link above didn't provide clues on how it treats tempos that change or drift like one might expect from someone recording a track without the benefit of a click track to keep them on the tempo.
 
I've had folks send me tracks and ask me to put accompaniment to it.... but that's a nearly impossible trick with fluctuating tempo

Guitarhacker
The bigger problem is when the folks recording the tracks did not use a click...and tend to drift in tempo..... straight up midi won't work for laying down drums.
 
Just a quick glance through of the link above didn't provide clues on how it treats tempos that change or drift like one might expect from someone recording a track without the benefit of a click track to keep them on the tempo.
 
I've had folks send me tracks and ask me to put accompaniment to it.... but that's a nearly impossible trick with fluctuating tempo

Karl has a solution to this problem http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VR7WkHywTo&list=PL6C8A51A85BDA4609
 
Rocky

Thanks guys.
 
The reason a click track wasn't used is because the person is a young girl, 15 or 16 I think. She just wanted to record a few of her songs and I offered to do it for her. I did tell her she should learn to use a metronome, but didn't go into great detail that day simply to not complicate it.
 
I wanted to see if I could easily find a tempo to add a beat and maybe some other stuff to beef it up for her. She wants to record more of her songs so I figured if I could spice what she's already done up a bit it might inspire her to want to work a little harder at it.

Yuo can use Audio snap, but you will need to align each track with Audiosnap to make sure nothing is out of time. Each track needs to be in time, or any drum synth you use will not be in sync with it. Also, an easy way I find a tempo is to click the mouse in one of my delay tempos effects. It take me about 10 seconds to do, but you may have to align the tracks first in audio snap before doing this.
 
Cj

You can use Audiosnap for this, and see if you can get it to identify on the transients (like a guitar strum).  What I usually like to do is get an approximate tempo guess (from something like Tap Tempo) then initially set the tempo to that, then turn on the metronome, then turn on Audiosnap, and quantize to 1/4 note beats.  Then set the threshold to try to get as many Audiosnap handles on the beats as possible, otherwise manually put them on needed transients, and then slide them back or forth to lock them on the beat.  Don't forget to set the highest quality render before you start (for both real-time and offline) and freeze when your finally done to check the highest quality. 
 
Since it's only guitar and vocals, it might be something that Audiosnap works well for, especially if you have separate vocal and guitar tracks.  However, if you have just a full mix, I find that Audiosnap just leaves too many audible artifacts.  For much better processing, I use Ableton Live's Audio Warping feature, which seems to work every single time for me with very little to no audible artifacts.
 
Once you get it locked to tempo, that's where the fun really begins.  I work with kids about her age, and it's really kinda neat to seem them adding drums and loops and becoming interested in production. 
 

Thanks for the link bluzdog. That video explains how to do exactly what you want to do.  Of course it assumes that any recorded tracks are already in time with each other. If they aren't audio snap can also be used to sort that out but that is a different video.

 
This article may be of use :
 
Tempo – The Last DAW Frontier?
 
 

I'm surprised nobody mentions Process > Fit Improvization. Tap along to the song with a MIDI controller, recording those beats. Manually inspect it to make sure the MIDI notes match up with the transients, make sure you have beats all the way back to 1:0:0, then use Fit Improvization to set the tempo to match your beats. I did a whole EP that way. As far as I can tell, it's basically doing the repetitive 'Set Measure/Beat At Now' work (as in Karl's video), but at where you put the MIDI events, instead of requiring you to manually do all the measures yourself. (Although to be fair, that doesn't always take that long if the beat is consistent throughout.)
 
The only downside I saw is that the resulting tempo is only as good as your timekeeping, so if the drummer is perfectly in time and you are not, you'll make things slightly worse. You might be able to use Audiosnap to help here - enable Audiosnap on your drum track, then you can quantize your tapped beat to those drum hits before you Fit Improvization, meaning most of the drum hits will end up exactly on the grid.