advice: how to align to measures and change temp per measure

[jm52]

I have a project recorded on a 4 track tape machine.
Click track and 3 instrument tracks.
It was recorded at half speed. So it is faster at speed.

I want to:
Use click track to align to measures.
Make midi tracks from each track.
Reduce the speed to about 1/4 speed for the first 2 measures.
Then, increase the tempo for each measure/section until the last section is again at the current speed.

Suggestions for links to learn how to:
align click to measures?
increase tempo per measure?
Rendering:
I assume I will have to export tracks/stems to apply the speed changes to the audio/midi.

Guidance please

[John Vere]

It is actually all in the user guide which is by far your best option.

what I do is google each question and it will usually give me the answer as well as a few YouTube’s. 
 

if you’re goal is to use midi the tempo map will be crucial. 
A quick method that works well with drum or bass tracks is to drag them to the timeline. Melodyne will create a tempo map. 

Edited Wednesday at 03:03 PM by John Vere

[David Baay]

Short answers:

- Any way you slice it, this is not a job for a DAW beginner or the faint of heart or the impatient. As mentioned, Youtube and the Ref. Guide are your friends for learning the details of how these operations work.

- Use Set Measure/Beat at Now (Shift+M)  on every downbeat of the click track (using Tab to Transients to snap the Now Time) to align the timeline to musical measures with tempo changes that Sonar will calculate and insert fo you. If timing within measures is not tight, you can set additional beats of the click track or even all beats if you want.

- Once you have the tempos dialed in, you will need to enable Audiosnap on all the audio clips,  set the follow option to Autostretch and enable Follow Project.

- Decreasing the tempo of the first section is a simple matter of selecting the relevant range of time in the Tempo Track and using the Tempo Offset function to lower them by a percentage.

- Ramping up the tempos in the latter part will reuiqre a more manual approach as Sonar does not currently have the doeing that with existing tempos, Inless you're willing to delte all the tempo, and replace them by Inserrt Series of Tempos to create a perfectly linear increase.

- Converting audio to MIDI can be done either before or after making the tempo changes, but is much easier said than done in any case and will require musical knowledge and a good ear as well as skill with CbB to get anywhere near satisfactory results. It will also require a 3rd-party plugin like Melodyne  to convert polyphonic parts, and the initial results will be rough and require a lot of polishing to sound anything like the original, depending on the instrument and the material. CbB has a Drum Replacer function that will help extract basic kick, snare, toms and hi hat patterns, but if the  drumming is complex, it will take a lot of work to get it right. Incidentally, Melodyne can also be used to extract a tempo map, but I prefer the result of doing it manually with Set Measure/Beat at Now.

 

 

[SirWillyDS12]

On top of what David said Cakewalk does have the ability to change the tempo by one of four different curves from one tempo to the other... Jump, Linear, Slow Curve or Fast Curve... All four will give a different result... Jump will change the tempo immediately when it gets to the new tempo in the map... Linear will change it in a linear fashion from one tempo to the next on the tempo time line... And the "Curves" will do just what they are from one tempo mark to the next...

[minminmusic]

I believe Ableton would really be your friend here for its time stretching capabilities. I think it has the ability to lock multiple waves into a group so any edits would be phase coherent.

I would figure out the approximate BPM via the click, then input that into Ableton as the master bpm. Then I would record into Ableton your 4-track material as 2 stereo files of 1L/2R - 3L/4R rather than 4 mono files that way you're only having to "group" two stereo files...potentially less chance for extreme phase issues. Once those two are in you need to group them, and have Abeton reset the beat markers off of the stereo file that had the click. You might have to play around with where the beat markers fall but for quantizing something like this, it's pretty easy to do.

Shame if it can't read a multitrack wave. I know Sound Forge can write them as I've used that to store a multi-mic drum sample session previously. I think that was 7 channels? Point being...it would be great to dump all 4 tracks in but as one locked wave file. That way, any timing edits all stay locked in together. Could also see it greatly minimizing the wow in those machines so a 4 track file that starts off at 120bpm will stay very close to that throughout the later moments in the song. As long as it isn't majorly off...Ableton does a pretty great job. 

Also...you COULD, once the files are in Ableton and locked to the grid, program in your tempo changes and then export all those tracks for further mixing/editing in your favorite DAW (mixing in Ableton SUX.)

Sometimes you have to prep files before you can move to the next step. Good luck!