Tempo Correction, No click track Options

[whitecloud]

Just got a archived Dat tape from a pro keyboard player,Dr John type funky, his timing is great, only trouble is no click track and I need to put drums and loops on it.What can i use to line them up and correct the timing. Thanks Jon.

[banevt]

What program are you planning on using to do your sequencing? Are there only keyboard files or is there something with some transients in it? Most likely the keyboard player either started all the tracks on the same bar when they were recorded so you should be able to line them all up on bar one in whatever program you are using, or put a click or some other sound at the same spot in every audio track so you could line them up to the waveform of that sound. If not I don't know how you are going to line them up correctly withoug his help. In Logic I would probably find 4 to 8 bar section of a track with an easily recognizable waveform and set up Logic to loop that section of audio. You should change the tempo so your looped section starts to sound like a proper loop. Once you have gotten close you can zoom in and check the waveforms to see that the first beat of the 1st bar and the 1st beat of the bar at the end of your loop lands on the same spot of the waveform as close as you can get. The better you do this the better the tempo will lock. Logic is good for this cause it allows for very minute changes in tempo. If you keyboard player used a sound or a click then you may have to cut your audio track at the beginning of your loop and snap that to the grid, then follow the procedure above. After you have determined the correct tempo you can set it in Logic and snap your audio track to a bar far enough ahead to allow you to drag it back and get the rest of your audio file. You would then line up the click sound of all the other tracks to that one. You should check the tempo with a click from start to end make sure it doesn't drift through the song before you line up all the tracks. This will save you a lot of work later. In Pro Tools you could do the tab to transient at the beginning of an audio file with definite transients to try and generate a tempo but I find that this isn't as accurate as Logic but it gets you close. Have you listened to the tracks? Maybe instead of just one click your friend gave you a full bar of click to line up which would mean that you could easily do the tab to transient thing in Pro Tools because it works much better with click. This would even make Logic easier to sync to because you wouldn't need a piece of audio just match up clicks. I hope I haven't made this seem like an extremely difficult process and you get it figured out. Good luck.
OH if this is on a DAT archive then it probably has a click or other sound at the top of each track to sync.
Valente

This post has been edited by banevt: Sat 24 Sep 2005, 03:47