Changing Tempo jumbles audio - absolutely SOLVED

[John Vere]

EDIT Nov 21 2020: This issue was solved thanks to staff member msmcleod who recommended changing from Musical to Absolute Time. I could not find this setting anywhere so I didn't try it right away. But last night when I did find the setting it worked flawlessly.

FYI- this is found in the Track inspector / Clip properties.  The reason I didn't see it at first is you need to highlight the clip. Duh. If you select all ( Ctrl A ) it will globally change all clips.  

 

I am going nuts trying to figure out why I can no longer change a songs tempo without all my audio tracks becoming way out of sync. 

I'm re doing some songs recorded using a real drummer. There's 6 drum tracks and then guitar bass and vocal.  I want to add piano, organ etc so best way is to create a tempo map. 

Just a week ago I successfully dragged the kick drum track to the time line and it created a perfect tempo map. This is cool as in the past you had to spend hours playing with audio snap and moving transient markers etc. Last night when I tried this on a different song you could see all the audio jump in all directions. It's like some of it follows and some doesn't. 

Out of curiosity I undid the tempo map, and tried just changing the tempo from the defaulted 120 to 100. Same thing happened. I tried all sorts of dumb ideas and got no where. I even opened the project in Splat and same thing, I also tried a different song. 

I watched a bunch of videos but they all use the old transient marker method, only one showed the new method. 

I have plenty of times changed an audio songs tempo so I could work with midi and it always worked. 

I check all my audio settings in preferences and they look the way they always do. 

Any ideas? A setting hidden somewhere? 

Edited November 21, 2020 by John Vere
Solved problem

[msmcleod]

Are some of your audio clips set to musical time, when they should be absolute (or the other way around) ?
 

[Craig Anderton]

30 minutes ago, John Vere said:

Any ideas? A setting hidden somewhere? 

Try different Melodyne algorithms.  Sometimes it seems the percussive one works best, sometimes it's the others.

[John Vere]

Mark- Well not sure about what your saying, I have never known such a setting existed. I guess I could that  look that up and see. It would seem there must be somthing different about these audio files. 

Craig- It's not Melodyn setting it's OK, And it's if I simply change the tempo. 

 and then the plot thickens. I opened a song I recorded a month or so ago of a live band and that works just fine. I think it's just this session where we recorded a whole album. What's weird about it, is the drums, bass and guitar are live  therefore should all be exactly the same format etc, and even those go out of sync. The drums only the kick goes out of sync and the rest of the kit channels are fine. But even the bass a guitar are out of sync. 

I think this is one of those cases that the time spent trying to figure out what's gone wrong with an old file is time better spent on starting fresh. 

I would love to use the drum track the rest is not that hard to redo. 

Of note was the way we recorded was to a Tascam us1641 and this was back when the drivers were terrible in 2012. I also used the SPDIF of my Yamaha o1v but those were the drum overheads which seem to sync with the snare and hats fine. 

[Craig Anderton]

It may not seem Melodyne has an influence, but it does. Try different algorithms and see what happens. I get very different results on the same material if I use different algorithms, even if it appears Melodyne isn't actually "doing" anything.

[Jacques Boileau]

I feel your pain John. I also struggle a lot with tempo and tempo map myself. I think for the uninitiated, it is a topic that is hard to grasp in Cakewalk.

I do not have a solution, but I may have info that might help figure it out. Keep in mind that Mark and Craig are light years ahead of me knowledge wise and my suggestions should be taken with that in mind.

What I have noticed when adjusting tempo, is when I do it at the start before I edit anything, I have much more success. When I have done some editing and a track gets broken up in two or more clips, things get moved around when I change the tempo. But only on tracks that made of multiple clips. I believe that if all you have are tracks that are one clip and all start at timestamp 0, it should be easier to change the tempo.

[John Vere]

Craig- As I said I know about the melodyne algorithms and totally agree that this will sometimes work.   But this is happening when I don't use Melodyne drag and drop, If I simply change the tempo in the widget everything goes weird.  And wasn't there a fix to the algorithm in the last Melodyne Update?  

Jacques- I think you are correct as like I say above I took a fresh project that had not seen any editing and it worked. 

I think what I'll do is try and salvage just the drum tracks that are behaving. I'll just have to build from there. 

I'll do that, make a tempo map, and then see what happens if I drag and drop the original guitar and bass tracks from the browser. I might get lucky. The bass I can play real fast but it was a lot of overdubs to get that guitar track.  Anyhow, gotta go get some chores done first. I'll keep everyone posted. 

[John Vere]

EDIT Nov 21 2020 - You can skip everything I do here as the solution was found in post #2.    ABSOLUTE   TIME 

 

OK I am managing to glue this all together but it's a hair pulling experience.  

I think I solved at least part of the issue by dragging the start points of all the tracks to zero. I'm in the habit of slip editing unwanted sound from the first few measures. I fussed with this until I had the drum count in ( sticks) on measure 2.01

 I had to try different drum tracks to drag to the time line and in the end , and no surprise, the snare track seemed to produce the correct tempo of around 63 BPM. I know this is correct because I also have a midi version of the song and it was done at 64BPM.  Note that the hi hat or the overheads produced a map based on around 98 BPM. The song is in 6/8 time so possibly triplets confuse the algorithm. 

 I now had a tempo map and all the drum tracks were in sync. Good. 

Nothing else was in time so I deleted those tracks and I'm now in the process of dragging them from the browser back to where they were. It's working. Just have to sort out my overdubs and which takes I used but they are now playing in sync. yeah! 

So a few things to keep in mind when trying to create a tempo map from a audio track. 

Obviously you should do this very early in the recording process. The fewer audio tracks the better. 

Make sure all the audio is end to end on the time line. Hopefully this is a piece played from start to finish. 

Crop and slip edit all tracks to the start and the put the  first transient on measure 2.01  or 3.01 

Pick a track that has the steadiest transients on the 1/4 or 1/2 like a snare or kick. 

The times I see using this process is when you have played a song without a click track as in a live band,  a session with a group of musicians or just you and your guitar and piano. The Creative Sauce video is very good at demonstrating an example of a guitar piece and how free form timing is a good thing. My song the drummer was very steady and the resulting tempo map is just a little bit wavy.  I think this matters, a song with a lot of tempo changes will probably crash. 

 

Edited November 21, 2020 by John Vere

[Jacques Boileau]

Excellent, glad it worked out. My drummer is not as steady as yours, and I can say that a tempo map with dozens of tempo changes, works well too. No crashes.

[John Vere]

I spoke to soon, Weirdness is happening half way through the song. There were a few punch ins on the vocals and now they are drifting. Also the lead guitar for some weird reason is missing an entire solo??? This seems related to "take Lanes comping"  where stuff is in layers as opposed to tracks.  But otherwise I just about have it all.    

[msmcleod]

9 minutes ago, John Vere said:

I spoke to soon, Weirdness is happening half way through the song. There were a few punch ins on the vocals and now they are drifting. Also the lead guitar for some weird reason is missing an entire solo??? This seems related to "take Lanes comping"  where stuff is in layers as opposed to tracks.  But otherwise I just about have it all.    

Are you sure it's not related to musical vs absolute time?

For example, say my project is at 120bpm and my clip is at measure 5, but set to absolute time ( 8 seconds in )

Changing the tempo to 240bpm, means my clip STILL plays at 8 seconds in, but on the time rule it's now at measure 9.

[John Vere]

Ok I found the setting and all of them are set to Musical, Should I change to Absolute ?? 

 

Edited November 20, 2020 by John Vere

[Jacques Boileau]

1 hour ago, John Vere said:

Ok I found the setting and all of them are set to Musical, Should I change to Absolute ?? 

 

If all else fails, you may want to try doing a bounce to track for the vocal track. Then the new track will be a single clip and should adjust correctly to the tempo. But it would certainly be nice to be able to do it without this workaround.

[John Vere]

I think that is a good idea and I will try that. Thanks

[John Vere]

On 11/19/2020 at 8:46 AM, msmcleod said:

Are some of your audio clips set to musical time, when they should be absolute (or the other way around) ?
 

So my first reply from Mark (msmcleod)  was the (of course) correct answer to this issue. All weirdness gone. A huge thanks to Mark and apologies for not following through right away. I did go looking for the toggle but couldn't find it. In the end it was in the first place I looked but I failed to highlight a clip so nothing was there. But yesterday I found it. 

I got up this morning, opened the original untouched project, and all I did was globally change the clip properties to Absolute time. 

I dragged the snare track to the time line and it Bingo- worked!  

[Jacques Boileau]

40 minutes ago, John Vere said:

So my first reply from Mark (msmcleod)  was the (of course) correct answer to this issue. All weirdness gone. A huge thanks to Mark and apologies for not following through right away. I did go looking for the toggle but couldn't find it. In the end it was in the first place I looked but I failed to highlight a clip so nothing was there. But yesterday I found it. 

I got up this morning, opened the original untouched project, and all I did was globally change the clip properties to Absolute time. 

I dragged the snare track to the time line and it Bingo- worked!  

Thanks for reporting back and thanks to @msmcleod for the tip. I'll try that next time I'm stumped trying to create a tempo map! Where is this setting located, I never came across it?

[John Vere]

I edited my first post so folks searching for an answer would find it easy. 

The toggle was right in front of my nose where I thought it must be in the track inspector under the Clip tab/ Time Base--  but there's was no information when I looked. You have to highlight a clip ( track) first.

I then discovered if I used CTRL A to select all, the toggle will do every track and clip at once.  it will show as "multi"  if there are different values present. This is cool because it would be easy to miss a hidden track or take lanes. My vocal track was split into dozens of pieces even though it's only 2 wave files in the audio folder but that's why the weirdness.  So  Absolute time works on a project that has had a lot of editing happen. 

Now I can get to work recording Piano and Organ and not worry about my sloppy playing  Midi to the rescue! 

I'll also be able to use drum replacer and tighten up the kick and bass lines. 

Edited November 21, 2020 by John Vere

[Jacques Boileau]

I tried this on the last project of a live performed song I worked on. I too had missed the setting @msmcleod was talking about. I was not on the clip properties tab in the inspector where it's located. In case this may help someone stumbling on this thread: I was not successful at first but here is how I fixed things.

It almost worked, but the last problem I faced, is that after setting all my clips to 'time base: absolute' and using the kick drum track to set the tempo by dragging it up on the time line so that Melodyne would extract the tempo, all my clips stayed in sync except for the the kick drum track that had been trimmed to the first beat by the process. Instead of starting a few measures in as it was supposed to, it started at the first beat desynchronized with the rest of the tracks.

Before:  

After:     

I knew I could probably nudge it back into place, but decided to try one more thing. I undid the tempo detection, left all the tracks to 'absolute' except the kick track which I changed to 'musical', dragged the kick track to the timeline and the tempo map was created perfectly leaving the kick track where it belong. All tracks where in sync and I had a nice tempo map that followed a live performance, which I could set tempo related effects to! Yes! Something I struggled with for a very long time. Now it seems this thread has given me a new insight into the process of creating a tempo map from a live performance!