Suggestions please
Hi Guys,
I have some tracks recorded to which I want to add some MIDI drums. I know it would have all been much easier if I had recorded a MIDI track first, but I had to record “on location” into stereo (guitar and vocal panned hard left and right, split into 2 mono tracks back in the studio). The tempo is pretty constant, although not metronomic. I was hoping to be able to overdub a “MIDI pulse” track (one click per beat or whatever), which I could then use to control a proper MIDI drum track, so that it follows any slight tempo changes on the recorded tracks.
If this isn’t possible, any other suggestions on how to achieve this very welcome.
Quote: (JeffM @ Nov. 14 2007, 1:33 PM)
Hi Guys,
I have some tracks recorded to which I want to add some MIDI drums. I know it would have all been much easier if I had recorded a MIDI track first, but I had to record "on location" into stereo (guitar and vocal panned hard left and right, split into 2 mono tracks back in the studio). The tempo is pretty constant, although not metronomic. I was hoping to be able to overdub a "MIDI pulse" track (one click per beat or whatever), which I could then use to control a proper MIDI drum track, so that it follows any slight tempo changes on the recorded tracks.
If this isn't possible, any other suggestions on how to achieve this very welcome.
Did you record the audio tracks to a click? If not you have really built a mountain for yourself to climb.
I guess it's possible by littering the track with tempo changes, or manually adjusting the midi notes to fit the timing but you would probably be better off playing the track into n-track and recording it as MIDI... eg hammer out the kick drum on your keyboard and record that, then add the snare etc. Once you have a midi track you can tweak, etc, to your heart's content.
Jamstix might be able to help here. Don't know really as I got put off by its style when I last tried it (albeit quite a while ago now).
I do not use midi much, but I would like to do the samething - add midi drums (or even other instruments) to existing tracks.
I do have a midi keyboard, and I have added drum sounds by taping the keys in tempo with what is playing bsck.
To my uninformed mind, there should be a way to tap in a click track, including when the players slightly changed from the absolute, and have a midi play along.
I bought Jamstix thinking I might be able to do this, but I have not had time to learn the program - will it work?
Thanks for the suggestions. I have now decided to approach the problem from a different direction. I am using a MIDI drum track that is constant tempo and using Acid Pro to stretch the .wav file to fit to it.
As I said before, the tempo only varies slightly so I’m not having to stretch it too much and initial experiments are sounding pretty good.
Quote: (JeffM @ Nov. 16 2007, 6:54 AM)
Thanks for the suggestions. I have now decided to approach the problem from a different direction. I am using a MIDI drum track that is constant tempo and using Acid Pro to stretch the .wav file to fit to it.
As I said before, the tempo only varies slightly so I'm not having to stretch it too much and initial experiments are sounding pretty good.
Excellent idea. Let us know how it works out
Happy to hear of you progress.
Hmmm $300+ for Acid Pro
Here’s a freebie time-stretch util to kind of play around with.
http://www.xs4all.nl/~mp2004/bp/#download
You can load a file and try it.
Unfortunatlely, you’d probably have to paste in the
parts (seperate files) - time-stretch - save and paste
back in. Maybe too much trouble.
Lot’s of luck 
You don’t have to send $300 on Acid Pro - you can pick up early versions cheap on Evil Bay or at computer shows. I got mine ages back (it’s version 1).
The thing about Acid is that it doesn’t just time stretch - it detects beats (or you can mark/move them around) and treats each beat like a separate sample and then fires them off in steady time so it moves them around rather than just stretching the whole sample. Not sure if I explained that very well - mabe someone can do it better.
You can also have the other tracks running at the same time so you can hear how well things are synching.
It is difficult to synch up a vocal track on its own as a lot of the words will naturaly start before or after the beat so what I did is use a stereo track with the vocal and a guitar (or a click) panned hard left and right. I got the “rhythm” channel in time with my MIDI drums and the vocal slipped in to place naturally. I then made a new .wav file of just the vocal part.
I found it was much easier to do this in bite sized chunks - a verse or chorus at a time.
It was actually quite fun to do and I’m going through some old stuff to see if there is anything else that would benefit from this treatment!!!
An alternative to chopping and stretching the audio is to use a sequencer that can slave tempo to an audio track. N-track can’t do this, but some of the more evolved sequencers can. (I know Cakewalk used to be able to do this, so I assume Sonar can, for example).
To do it in n-track, you have to insert tempo changes manually. It’s painful brain surgery, but it works. What I do is:
1. set the starting tempo as close as possible to the audio tracks
2. slide your audio tracks so they start clean on a beat one
3. create a new midi track with note events on the beats (a short sinewave bip or ride sample works well)
4. listen to where the midi track and audio tracks start to drift
- if the audio track starts to get ahead of the midi, insert a tempo change that increases tempo by a couple of bpm
- if the audio track starts to lag, insert a lower bpm
To minimize the amount of fiddling, try making less drastic bpm changes but insert them a beat or two earlier than where you notice the drift.
Obviously this gets impractical fast if the tempo varies too frequently. But once you’ve got tempo locked to your audio you can add midi tracks to your heart’s content with everything in synch.
KB
I do this by hand, either when I’m duplicating a cover song, or when I’m recording a keyboard part for someone else’s song and they didn’t start with a computer-generated click.
It’s a bit of a tedious process, but I can do a 4 minute song in less than an hour. Much less if the band has rock steady timing. Believe it or not, Beatles songs are easy: Ringo had very steady timing! Much harder was Steely Dan’s AJA, where the tempo is all over the map (to my surprise).
You do not want to tap it in. It would not be likely to be accurate enough.
The trick is to make a MIDI tempo map. The way you do it is to keep adding tempo change events to the timeline (right-click on the time-bar on the timeline to add, and select “bpm change” or something like that.
I wrote up a detailed description of the process; I’ll see if I can find it. Hopefully I didn’t just post it on the forum – since it would be poof by now.