Elastic Audio question

[Ty Ford]

I have a client who can not play to a click track. His timing is a little off. I have three tracks; vocal, miced guitar and direct guitar.

I'd like to group the three tracks and apply some quantizing to the three tracks while in elastic mode to try and shape him up a bit.

Bad idea? Other thoughts?

Thanks,

Ty Ford

[HurtMesaMusic]

Hello Ty,

You can try to quantize elastic audio events but unless the performance is at a solid tempo and close to the clock, it probably won’t be good.

My approach would be to group the tracks as you mentioned (not clip group). Set your session tempo to an average that is as close as possible to the performance. If the performance tempo changes a lot, you’re going to have to split the tracks into sections, ie, verse, chorus, etc. I highly recommend this approach. Drag the sections so you have a couple of measures space between them.

Set the tracks to polyphonic elastic audio. (You could try setting elastic audio to mono for the vocal, poly for the guitar, etc. with the group disabled, but I haven’t tried this.)

Instead of attempting to quantize the elastic audio events, I would manually adjust timing by setting the tracks to warp view. This is tricky, so save your session frequently.

Before moving any of the warp markers, it’s important to go through the entire song and pin down a marker every measure or so. Double click markers but don’t drag them yet. Otherwise, the tracks will accordion in or out and you’ll have a hot mess. Save and Undo are your friends.

Again, you may need to split the song into sections to get some room to work.

After pinning down markers, decide whether to start at the beginning or end of the song. If the session tempo is slightly faster than the recording, then most of the time, you’ll be reducing the length of clips. This will keep sections from overlapping as you correct the timing.

Now you can start aligning the downbeat of a section with beat one on the grid. Try locking the downbeat of each measure or every other measure.

When you get all the sections done, drag them back together and add crossfades.

Realtime elastic audio often sounds crappy. So at this point I change polyphonic to X-Form. When the conversion is complete, hopefully the audio is good enough for jazz. Commit the tracks.


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[albee1952]

Great advice above. Here's some more:
1-Save Session Copy and include audio files. That way, no matter how screwy things get with EA, the original audio is available and untouched.
2-Instead of aiming for "perfection", just massage the places that get way out.
3-If EA starts causing gurgled audio, revert and start over using the X-Form option(if available). with X-Form, there will be much fewer artifacts, BUT(the great big BUT), it renders every single edit, which can take several minutes in a 3-4 minute song. The solution is to chop the audio into clips that fit on screen(so PT is rendering clips a few bars in length, and not a 3 minute audio file).

In the future, you might try giving something for timing reference other than a simple click. Maybe a basic drum beat(kick, snare, hat) or some of my players find a shaker is easier to follow than the stock click

[HurtMesaMusic]

That’s an excellent suggestion, Dave, regarding giving the artist a drumbeat to record to instead of a basic click.

And for what it’s worth, I’ve found that I can use any of the Realtime Elastic Audio settings to correct timings and live with the gurgling temporarily. As a last step, I change EA to XForm so the gurgling goes away. Then commit the tracks by committing them directly or by turning off XForm and committing in the EA dialog window.

I also avoid using warp markers in the middle of longer sustained notes. This helps in getting the most natural sound.

Thanks


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