finer bpm subdivision

[paul terry]

Hi

first of all great daw, I am gradually migrating over to cakewalk from reaper and previous to this I used ableton lite and synapse audio's orion pro.  currently cakewalk has become my number one daw and I am really enjoying using it. one thing I am having some frustration with is bpm sub division. I can't seem to find a way to edit the bpm finer than two decimal places? 

reaper is perfect in this regard, as it has three decimal places after it which means if you record something or have music to sample that is off tempo by a tiny fraction then you can adjust the master tempo to such a fine degree that you can still work in the grid with the stem or sample being off the bpm. cakewalk unfortunately doesn't have such fine tuning, I would love to see bpm division change to 3 decimal places after a bpm number. for example 120.001 instead of 120.01. the difference when placing stems into my projects of 121.98 and 121.97 or 121.99 is enormous when trying to work inside the grid of a daw. by the time I have run from 0 seconds to 6 minutes that grid is now way off the beat. when mixing there isn't too much trouble but I run into issues when I use lfo shaper plugins that rely on the host daws tempo or effects that are bpm based, or if I need to overdub with my software based synths or samples. there is other ways around this like time stretching my stems to fit into the grid, that's an option sure, but I prefer to use a method that is the least destructive to my audio and although a change of stretching all the stems to fit into a larger bpm division might not be detectable to a lot of listeners I still think a method that gets around this in the least destructible way would be the first choice in terms of preference of workflow. I also suspect having finer divisions of bpm would have other uses within the daw. like I mentioned reaper is great for this as I generally think a third decimal place has you covered to adjust for the smallest of midi timing issues and things going off tempo when recording. if cakewalk could include this to a future update it would be amazing. if it's already in there but I just don't know how to access it? could someone please let me know.

anyway, great software, I hope to continue using it in my future work!

Edited March 13, 2021 by paul terry

[Base 57]

As you have found, there are only 2 decimal places in Cakewalk's BPM. But there is no need to do any destructive editing. Just add a tempo change of +/- .01 BPM before the difference becomes noticeable. At an average BPM of 120 a .01 difference adds up to .03 seconds in 6 minutes (I think, math is not my best subject) so you shouldn't need more than 3 or 4 tempo changes to keep everything on the grid. And maybe the slight variation will keep it from sounding like robots recorded it.

FWIW I would be happy to see another decimal in the Tempo grid. So +1 to that.

Edited March 13, 2021 by Base 57

[paul terry]

Base 57, that's an interesting idea and although I see the merit of it in certain musical styles I am not sure I would want to go this route in my music. some of it is made for dj's to play and some is inspired by music like kraftwerk. the idea sounds similar to something I used to do as a dj called "riding the pitch" where instead of using my hand on the turntable to gently slow it down I would use the pitch fader and correct it , I usually found this to be the more difficult method as it meant I often lost the nearest pitch point and it was probably the least elegant when listening to my mix. the problem was that there had to be a dramatic shift to counter act the direction the phase was going. usually I could not reverse the phase misalignment of for example a 4x4 kick on two records as that required such a small adjustment on the fader, but instead had to severely shift it in a counter direction then try to get it back to where it was.

when working in the daw with the method there wouldn't be any dramatic changes as it's using much finer adjustment. but, it will still be removing the pitch from the nearest possible place to further away from that nearest possible bpm so this means that correction will have to be monitored very closely to make sure its not corrected too far in the opposite direction.
it could take a lot of time to manually correct the pitch during a song and reverse the direction and study how long it takes to return to it's position I required it to be in and to make sure I don't overshoot. 
there are other problems with having a bpm not exact on the grid .the dynamics of plugins that work on a grid and rely on things being in a specific place for them to work best can be dramatically altered. certain types of compression, gating, and lfo along with their adsr envelopes may sound best when locked into the songs bpm as tight as possible and in the worst cases may not be working at all. in one instance I had a kickdrum that completely lost its attack because the plugin moved too much. 

there might be a way to get around it using the method you mention, but really I think it would be easier on us musicians to just have the finer bpm adjustment which we can set and forget at the start of the project, we are already part of the way there as cw includes a way to offset the grid so you can start the grid anywhere you like, so if your tracking session has a bit of silence it's a quick and easy way to mark the start of the daw grid. we just need the finer bpm so it can stay on that grid. working with finer bpm in my experience has meant I spend less time on this part so I can concentrate on other parts of the music. recently I had to dedicate a whole day to using the stretch audio method, for me none of the other methods I have tried have been as efficient as working with a fine bpm sub division.

[paul terry]

I noticed loading up the most recent version I have more subdivisions can be entered. looks like a number of decimal places can be typed in, over 3 from what I saw, 4 would be great.  perhaps this is now a work in progress? I hope so! I tried to set the bpm to be 3 or 4 decimal places but it didn't change from 2 as far as I could tell? seemed to round it up or down?