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Detect tempo of mutlitrack (NO AUDIO WARPING/QUANTISATION))

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2019 6:16 pm
by Airfixx
Hi,

I'm doing a mix of some multi-track stems in Live and I cannot find a way to detect the tempo of the track without warping the original audio.

I've already investigated the option of slaving the master tempo to a chosen stem (e.g. a drum loop), but a) that still requires me to warp said clip and b) leaves timing discrepancies between the newly warped audio and the rest of the original stems. I suspect there may be a way to warp clips in bulk, but still my aim here is to not warp or quantise the original stems and retain the truly live groove of the recorded performances.

My ultimate goal here is to ensure that any time-based FX (delay etc.) I use are in tight synch with the track tempo.

In Pro-tools I'd use Beat Detective to create a global tempo map which leave all the stems in tact...

Is live genuinely only suitable for mixing quantised/sequenced material? ...Surely not?




Anyone able to help out here? ..If so, please do as this is rather urgent!

Thanks in advance... :)

Re: Detect tempo of mutlitrack (NO AUDIO WARPING/QUANTISATION))

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2019 6:26 pm
by yur2die4
Warp one. Duplicate the channel. Mute the warped channel. That’s how you can use master/slave without having your playback clips warped.

Re: Detect tempo of mutlitrack (NO AUDIO WARPING/QUANTISATION))

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2019 6:34 pm
by Airfixx
yur2die4 wrote:
Wed Feb 13, 2019 6:26 pm
Warp one. Duplicate the channel. Mute the warped channel. That’s how you can use master/slave without having your playback clips warped.
Thanks for your reply....

Surely then there is no relationship between the original audio and the tempo 'map' that's been created leaving me essentially no further forward.... The tempo map will be as per the warped audio....?

Re: Detect tempo of mutlitrack (NO AUDIO WARPING/QUANTISATION))

Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2019 4:34 am
by yur2die4
It can actually get ‘slightly’ more tricky than how I described it.

First align all the tracks. Then in a track with clear transients, find the ‘one’, or A ‘one’. This will be your warping clip. But don’t warp it yet.

Being aligned, drag the start point of all the clips by dragging the left edge so they all share that same ‘one’. This is somewhat important for making sure that when you warp and then set as master/slave, you had a common reference point for all the clips.

So the clip you’re about to warp, you may duplicate so you have an unwarped version.

Now go through and warp this reference, warping track. By doing this, you’ll find the tempo of each part and be putting a ‘grid’ over the clip that makes sense. The clip itself may seem out of sync with the others While you’re warping it since the arrangement tempo is static and not set with regard to the arrangement. But if you warp your clip properly it should have a clean grid over it and play well to a metronome.

Once the clip is warped, make sure that starting point on the One is still lined up with the other clips. When you hit the master/slave button, that warped clip will set the tempo of the arrangement view over parts of the time line that it is on. All the other clips should appear now to have the grid going in line with their audio material. As long as you don’t move them, you’ve set arrangement view’s grid to be in like with the audio and the audio should be unwarped aside from that single reference clip.

I guess the question is what the purpose of your grid will be. For most applications this should be enough. If you need to duplicate a section, you’ll have to make sure to keep that warped clip with it.

Warping in itself can get messy though, and if there is a lot of tempo variation it can make things seem unnatural unless you’ve really gone in deep with the warping and done it in a manner that takes drastically varying tempo into consideration.

Aside from that, there isn’t really any other way to get a tempo/grid based workflow from raw stems.

Re: Detect tempo of mutlitrack (NO AUDIO WARPING/QUANTISATION))

Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 12:32 pm
by Airfixx
yur2die4 wrote:
Thu Feb 14, 2019 4:34 am
It can actually get ‘slightly’ more tricky than how I described it. ......
Many thanks for the fuller reply.... I just managed to give this a try and it seems to work fine for my purposes. I can see that I could become "messy" as you put it, but I'm only really trying to retain the original swing of the recording whilst using the grid to synch delays etc.

Cheers, boss!

Re: Detect tempo of mutlitrack (NO AUDIO WARPING/QUANTISATION))

Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 3:34 pm
by yur2die4
Ah for swing I actually don’t know. You can acquire the ‘groove’ from a clip and put it into the groove pool. You can find the groove ‘clips’ used by the groove pool, they’ll be simple midi with timing and velocity info. And you can edit that to taste, to maybe simplify it. Then put the newly edited clip in the pool and use that if you make any new midi clips, to add swing to the new clips you make.