best way to generate click...

[Anibal]

How do you generate a click to an existing audio track that was recorded without one?
is it there any way to do it by taping and marking the begining of each bar?
The track is a stereo mix and I can't use beat detective to do it...

thanks

[timc]

It's easy enough to do it with a sequencer that can play back the audio recording in synch with the click you are building.

(1) Try to determine the tempo ball-park.

(2) Record one click in the sequencer and locate that click on the start of the track.

(3) Now, generate several measures of quarter note clicks at the tempo you imagine is the ball-park tempo.

(4) At the moment you feel any drift, go into the sequencer tempo map (conductor track... whatever they call it on your program) and adjust the tempo till you are in synch for a bar or so.... or a beat or so...

(5) Impose a tempo change in your conductor track when you feel a drift... and that's it! Well... you may have to make adjustments to the tempo every beat or so... but that depends on your need.

You can refine this until it's perfect if you have a reason to do that... like you are sequencing midi instruments to a recorded track.

If you are just creating a guide click for real humans, they probably won't need the click to be perfect. They may not need a click at all...

Best of luck,


TC

[Rail Jon Rogut]

Switch to conductor mode -- Identify the second bar of the song and use Identify Beat (in the Edit Menu).. now identify bar 16 and use Identify Beat -- continue to identify as many (or as few) beats as required.

Use the Click plug-in for your click.

Rail

[Steve@ZooWest]

Timc's method works well if the track was cut to a click (doesn't matter how it was generated). If that is the case - you can speed things a little as follows:

Once you have that tempo down to where it's getting quite close, you won't need to start the session at the beginning and wait for drift. Start it into the tune 30 sec or a minute or more, determine which way the tempo needs to be bumped, and then repeat the procedure...you then, of course, can continue to start farther and farther into the song to see which way it drifted, and adjust in ever decreasing increments.

If the track was cut clicklessly, and there is not sufficient info on the track to help derive one, you'll have to do what you already probably know - start at the beginning of the song, tap a midi click all the way through the song, and then listen through and adjust the clicks that are too far off for you. 10 ms seems to be a good compromise as far as a nudge amount. This may all be info you already know, but often I miss something obvious...

[Rail Jon Rogut]

Uh -- if you simply use Identify Beat as I indicated you wouldn't have to tap through the song - which is an archaic method.

Rail

[Monte McGuire]

As Rail says, Identify Beat is definitely the way to go. Why guess when you can explicitly define where the notes fall. This method is exceedingly accurate and takes little time compared to guessing. If I have to do some hairy editing and I can't tell exactly what's wrong with a passage, I will frequently use Identify Beat for a few measures around the trouble spot to make the bars|beat display work properly, so I can use the grid lines in the edit window to see where the notes really fell as compared to how they should have been played.

One subtlety is that you want to be careful which beat you use to identify each measure / phrase if you care about how each measure gets divided up. For example, good drummers will usually pull and push various beats within a measure differently. So, you want to do cmd-I on only beat 1 for example, or only beat 2 and 4, depending on what figure is being played and how it's accented. Never identify some beats done with hand and then others done with foot unless they seem to be accented the same way (pretty rare in my experience...)

Best of luck,

-monte-

[Anibal]

thank you guys, good tips, everything is working fine...

[Kenny Gioia]

Wouldn't beat detective be even easier?

[Anibal]

Wouldn't beat detective be even easier?

read the original post...

[Steve@ZooWest]

Uh -- if you simply use Identify Beat as I indicated you wouldn't have to tap through the song - which is an archaic method.

Rail

Thanks, Rail - very true if the beat is pretty solid. Also, I find the vocalized puase a nice effect.

I recently worked with a band that had a lot of tempo fluctuations on unclicked material - tapping still seems better in that situation than identify beat, unless of course it has to be extremely accurate.