Tempo Mapping - Set to audio

[Tim Bauer]

Hello - It's been a long time between upgrades for me. Once upon a time I was pretty well versed in Sonar 8. Started a family...blah, blah, blah.  Starting to get back into it. Decided it was time for a DAW overhaul and upgrade to cakewalk. I'm pleasantly surprised by the latest release everything seems to be an overall improvement. There is one tool that I used to use all the time that I can't seem to replicate. I like to "re-produce" covers - just for my own fun and amusement. My biggest issue is always setting the tempo map to match the original song, I do this for drum parts. In Sonar 8 I was able to simply click on the source track, hit F12 and it would launch Audio Snap Palette. I would adjust the threshold to set my transients at about every beat. Then I could move from transient to transient and click Set Measure / Beat at Now, and it would "re-set" the measure to whatever value I told it.  I found this to be a pretty fool proof way of setting the project temp and metronome to more or less follow the source material.  I can't seem to duplicate this function with the upgraded software. any help here would be appreciated.

 

[msmcleod]

If you've got the Melodyne installed, either the trial version (installed under "Addons" in BandLab Assistant) or any of the licensed versions, you can simply drag the audio track to the time ruler and it'll create a tempo map for you.

If you'd prefer to use the Audio Snap Palette, the keyboard shortcut is now ALT + A.

 

[Tim Bauer]

Melodyne seems to have worked, although not perfectly. It's probably my inexperience using the tool causing the issues. Thanks for the suggestion. I'll keep playing with it and The Audio Snap Palette, there must be something in there that will do what I'm after.

 

[Tim Bauer]

So Melodyne wasn't exactly getting it done, so I "did my homework" and figured out my old method from Sonar days. First you need to come up with a "average temp" then set your metronome to match. Then move your source audio to roughly line up with the temp.

Select the source track for the metronome, then open the Audio Snap palette (ALT+A), then click edit clip map. This will set audio transients. Use the Threshold slider to get it in the sweet spot, you are shooting to get a transient at just about every beat. It won't always be perfect, but you don't need it to be perfect. then you simply hit the TAB key to move to the next Transient. 

Turn on the metronome for playback, and playback the track, when the audio starts to misalign with the metronome, find the closest transient to a down beat and click the set measure/beat at now (shift +m). this will allow you to "stretch the tempo" to fit back to the source audio. Keep playing the song from this spot, and when it starts to get off again, do the same thing.

This might be a bit more tedious than dropping the track in the time bar and letting Melodyne do it's thing, but I find the manual method produces less noticeable change in the tempo.

 

Thanks again for all your help.