"Striping Timecode"

[msmcleod]

2 hours ago, Akahum said:

Hi, lots of interesting info on this thread, but not quite my situation. Years ago I digitised my 8 track spools and some projects have the MTC / SMPTE track. Does anyone know of a plugin etc that will read this?
Cheers. 

AFAIK there's no plugin to do this, you need a hardware converter to convert the SMPTE timecode to MTC.

In saying that, if you've alread recorded all 8 tracks at once into your DAW, there's no need to use the timecode track.  All you need is to create a tempo map from the existing audio, and there are several ways of doing that, i.e.:

1. Drag an audio track to the time-line and let Melodyne extract the tempo; OR
2. Insert a MIDI track, arm it, then record the same single note played every beat.  Then select the clip, then Process->Fit Improvisation from the main menu; OR
3. Set the now time to various points in the track, and "Set Beat as Now" giving the relevant measure/beat at the now time.  The tempo will be calculated based on all previous "Set Beat as Now" operations.

[Akahum]

Thanks Mark, it was a longshot. Saying that, it shouldn't be a difficult plug in to create. I've already extracted the tempo with Melodyne, it would just be cool for tracks with tempo changes to use the original MTC  

[msmcleod]

11 hours ago, Akahum said:

Thanks Mark, it was a longshot. Saying that, it shouldn't be a difficult plug in to create. I've already extracted the tempo with Melodyne, it would just be cool for tracks with tempo changes to use the original MTC  

IIRC, I don't think the timecode contains ANY tempo information at all.

The timecode on tape contains only the hours/minutes/seconds/frames.  

You'd stripe the tape first, then set the zero offset for measure 1, then enter the tempo map into the tape-sync device. The device would then read the timecode from tape and send out MTC via MIDI using the tempo map you'd entered.

I used to use a JLCooper  PPS-100 with my MT-8X.   Typically, I'd do the following:

1. Strip track 8 with the time-code.
2. Let it play from the beginning for around 10 - 15 seconds, then stop.
3. Set measure 1 to the current position, and enter in my tempo map into the PPS-100.
4. Set Cakewalk to sync to MTC and arm my tracks
5. Rewind the tape, press record in Cakewalk and play (or rec if I was recording on tape as well) on the tape machine.
6. Record my MIDI within Cakewalk, and audio on tape.

You can be as accurate or inaccurate as you want to be in step 3, depending on whether you need things aligned to a grid within Cakewalk.  For some projects, I just set the tempo arbitrarily to 120bpm, and forgot about it - especially if I was recording a keyboard part to an existing recording on tape.  The song wasn't actually in 120bpm, but it didn't matter as I wasn't using the metronome, and I wasn't interested in editing the MIDI; all I wanted was to record a MIDI performance and have it play it back exactly as played.

My usual workflow in this case was:
1.  On a blank tape, record the whole band on to one mono track (usually track 8 )
2.  Record the drums on tracks 1 to 4, with the drummer playing along with the guide track on track 8.
3.  Record the bass on track 5.
4.  Bounce the bass/drum tracks to a stereo pair on tracks 6/7.
5.  Use tracks 1 thru 5 to record the guitars, then finally the vocals.
6.  Stripe the tape on track 8 (overwriting the guide track), then record the keyboards in Cakewalk. 

Obviously every session was different, so I could end up with a bass on it's own and drums in a stereo pair, or bass/kick on one track, snare on another, and overheads on a pair etc.. all depended on how many tracks I had spare. Really, the only reason I used time-code was to get one or two stereo keyboard tracks for the price of one mono audio track.  I could also add a quiet drum machine kick or snare if needed, should the bounced drums balance not be quite right.

Once everything was good, I'd typically take Cakewalk out of the equation by recording the MIDI from Cakewalk on to my Alesis DataDisk.    That way, all I needed was the tape deck, the PPS-100, DataDisk and one or more MIDI sound modules.   I could play from any position on the tape,  and the DataDisk would pick up almost immediately.

I'd also do a sysex dump from the PPS-100 to the same floppy on the DataDisk, so that the tempo map / start time etc was there ready to be restored for that song.