Make the click track play in time with YOU! (AudioSnap)

[Creative Sauce]

Hi folks! If you are sick of robotic sounding songs, check out how to make the click track play with YOU, using Cakewalk by Bandlab!

WATCH HERE: https://youtu.be/I7D3wZldUJw

[Jim Fogle]

Love this video.  I've watched it multiple times and, with practice, I'm finally starting to get the hang of it.  The bugaboo is the drastic slowdowns at the end of a song,  I haven't quite figured that out yet.

[steve@baselines.com]

That is a lot of work.  If you are going to invest that much time in it.  Personally, I will drag a track up to the top bar (which changes color) and then go directly to the tempo map.  Looking at the track, I will edit the tempo map so that the beats fall where I want them to.  It is still some work to do, but you end up getting an exact tempo map without having to deal with the terrible audiosnap interface.

[Jim Fogle]

@steve@baselines.com

I read and reread what your saying but I'm not familiar enough with the CbB interface, tempo maps or editing tempo maps to understand or visualize the steps to perform what your saying.  Videos or animated GIFs are most helpful to me.

By the way, I enjoy and admire your music.  You have a nice touch.

[steve@baselines.com]

On 7/15/2020 at 12:24 PM, Jim Fogle said:

@steve@baselines.com

I read and reread what your saying but I'm not familiar enough with the CbB interface, tempo maps or editing tempo maps to understand or visualize the steps to perform what your saying.  Videos or animated GIFs are most helpful to me.

By the way, I enjoy and admire your music.  You have a nice touch.

Thanks Jim.  First, try this. 

- Get a recording of a song you may like to cover.  mp3,wav,whatever can be imported into Cakewalk. Select a track and do a File->Import.

- Once the track is in Cakewalk, check out the start of the file, cut out anything at the beginning that is before the song actually starts.  In this image I am about to delete the quiet part and move the rest of the track over to the left to the zero position.

Now if you select the track and hold down the shift key and the left mouse button while dragging up to the topmost bar (it will change color when you have done it), then release, cakewalk will calculate the tempo map from the file.  It may take a while to complete.  Often it is not perfect.  You can go into the tempo map to edit it as much as you want.  This is the time consuming part, but it is worth it if you want to record and line up other tracks with it.

Click on Views->Tempo to open up a graphic of the tempo map.  Then you can use the mouse to move the numbers pane to the right and expose the chart.

 

You can use the + and - horizontal and vertical magnifying glasses to size the chart appropriately.  Beats per minute is to the left.

This is where the time consuming part comes in. I turn on the metronome and look at the audio waveform to find out where the major beats are.  Here the audio is slightly after the beat. 

 

To correct something like this, you can actually hold the mouse button down and pull the tempo map line down before the cursor.

Like I say, it takes some time to get it right, but if you do it a few times, you get used to it.  Once you adjust it, you can use all of the midi tools to line things up close to the grid for any other midi tracks you will add, and you can also adjust the audio on any tracks where needed.

 

[Jim Fogle]

@steve@baselines.com,

Thank you for taking time to document and present your method.  I don't think I would ever have thought of dragging the tempo graph line up and down to adjust the tempo at a specific point.  Brilliant!  I can't wait to try this out.

There normally are more than one way to perform a certain task and what works for one may not work for another.  I'll have some fun learning which method sticks with me better.

[Starship Krupa]

This is great. AudioSnap, tempo maps, VocalSync I've tried messing about with them a few times and each time just had to stop when I reached what I felt was that "automated tool point of severely diminishing returns" where I had spent too many hours more moving little lines around in a clip without understanding the point than it would have taken me to re-record the audio or sit there with a MIDI keyboard and play along with one finger to make a click track that fit the audio.

You know, that point where you look up and realize that you've been tearing your hair out trying to get a noise gate set correctly for a much longer time than it would have taken you to slip edit or gain automate the unwanted sounds out of the track into digital infinity.

My workflow so far could be described as: "this isn't doing anything, this isn't doing anything, this isn't doing anything" and then I press a button and the whole project starts playing back like it's a 45RPM record on 33 1/3. Sometimes it's different, and after nothing having any effect, and pressing a button, a single track will start playing back like it's a 45RPM record on 33 1/3 while the rest of the project plays normally.

So it's good to see people using it and sharing their tricks. Next time I give it a shot, I'll stop and ask some questions and then come back to it. I've been giving up too easily.

I think mostly where I've tripped and fallen is the part where Cakewalk presents you with a clip with a bunch of vertical lines that you're supposed to drag around to "line up with the transients," and it's always seemed to me like it's started way off, like I could detect transients better with a morse code key and an old Heathkit oscilloscope. And I know it can't be that bad. Like maybe I'm setting it up wrong before the detection part or something? So I sit there not really knowing what I'm doing and also wondering why it's my job to spot the transients visually, because isn't that the algorithm's job? Yikes.

Definitely doing something wrong....