Getting Bar:Beat lined up with played MIDI (part 2)

[Mark_Knecht]

pk_hat, et. all,
Hi. The drums are all handled. Things worked out pretty nicely. Thanks. However, the piano track now is way out of time...

Now I have a second MIDI question. This one seems a little more difficult. Before I set the tempo I actually play a long 7 minute piano part against the audio track. The playing of the part came out pretty good, but as per my prevous question it is completely misaligned to the Bar:Beats stuff again.

I could now go in and start dragging everything to the nearest measure to get it on the beat, but that's going to be a lot of work. I could play it again, and in a couple of hours do all the note editing required 'cause guitar players dcan't play 7 minutes of piano without mistakes.

Here's the question. Assume I have a session with nothing in it except one MIDI piano track that wasn't played against the tempo of the session. It was just played. Is there any way to sort of slip the Bars:Beats grid underneath the MIDI notes WITHOUT actually moving the MIDI notes in real time? What I'm saying is I want the MIDI notes to stay the same amount of time apart from each other (for now) while I adjust the Bars:Beats underneath them. Then when I switch the tempo, everything would be pretty close to the right position, I'd quantize it, and then plug it into the other session and it would be on grid and back in time with the drums.

SAID ANOTHER WAY - How do I use 'Identfy Beat' on MIDI data?

Does any of this make ANY sense????

Hope you or someone else can help!

Thanks,
Mark

[pk_hat]

If I understand correctly, you recorded the piano part along with the song, so you were pretty close to the actual tempo, right?

Now, you say you've got the drum parts covered because you found the tempo of the song, changed your project tempo grid accordingly so that you could line up your beat to the new grid, resulting in your drum part and the song being pretty much in sync, correct?

So, now that you have the tempo set, the grid set, the midi drums are set, how can your piano be offset against the song?

If you initially recorded it as midi in time with the audio track, it should still be in time!
Now, from all of this it looks like you may not have lined up the audio track to the new grid, and perhaps this is what's throwing you off? You have to match the downbeat of the audio track to a bar on your project grid, even if it's the first downbeat of the song, as long as everything afterwards falls dead on, you should be set!

Now, for your piano. Changing the grid tempo should not affect the position of the midi data, the notes should stay where they are.

You may want to highlight the midi piano track and - same principle - match the downbeats between your piano and the track. Once you think you have it right, mute the song and see if your piano and midi drums are in the same time zone.

Also important is to set the proper resolution on your grid, so if your audio track is playing an 8th note pattern, try to match it on your grid. If the piano is busy with 16th and 32nd notes, again, before you move the whole track, set your grid to the proper resolution, it will make your editing a lot easier.

A little quantize here and there to tidy up some loose ends and you should be on your way to Elton's house for tea.


I hope this helps. If for some reason I went way off track with all of this (perhaps misunderstanding your q), cool, post again and we'll start over. [img]images/icons/wink.gif[/img]

pk

[Mark_Knecht]

pk_hat,
Thanks for posting back. I'm still working on this, so I've learned a bit more, but unfortunately not solved the problem yet. If anyone can help, it probably you! [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

I thought, when I posted this question earlier, that this was going to be easy. Now I'm not so sure. I'll try to cover it in a bit more depth...

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:<HR>Originally posted by pk_hat:
If I understand correctly, you recorded the piano part along with the song, so you were pretty close to the actual tempo, right?

Now, you say you've got the drum parts covered because you found the tempo of the song, changed your project tempo grid accordingly so that you could line up your beat to the new grid, resulting in your drum part and the song being pretty much in sync, correct?
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Completely correct so far. The song is 7 minutes of audio at (it turns out) 77.41BPM and the drum sequence (written by hand AFTER the tempo change) is completely in time with the song and lasts 7 minutes.


<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:<HR>Originally posted by pk_hat:
So, now that you have the tempo set, the grid set, the midi drums are set, how can your piano be offset against the song?

If you initially recorded it as midi in time with the audio track, it should still be in time!
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

OK, I'll explain how I think it's out of time. When the song was recorded, the tempo PTLE was operating at was 120BMP. At 120BMP, the 7 minute song appears to be approximately 200 measures long.

Indeed, when I slow the tempo that PTLE is operating at to 77BPM, the MIDI data does indeed stay locked to the grid. However, the grid gets 'longer' in real time precisely because the tempo is slower. At 77BPM the song is now longer by the ratio of 120/77. When I change the tempo, the audio data does not change 'length', but the MIDI data does change FROM A TIME PERSPECTIVE, but not from a grid perspective.

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:<HR>Originally posted by pk_hat:
Now, from all of this it looks like you may not have lined up the audio track to the new grid, and perhaps this is what's throwing you off? You have to match the downbeat of the audio track to a bar on your project grid, even if it's the first downbeat of the song, as long as everything afterwards falls dead on, you should be set!
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

And indeed this basically worked for the drum stuff that I had done, because it was on grid. Unfortunately, the piano is recorded off grid. Very off grid!

Said another way - the grid was running at 120bpm, but my fingers were running at 77BPM. Now that I've changed the grid to 77BPM, it looks and sounds like my finger are going about 45BPM!

As I looked at this problem, what I began to see is that actually the MIDI data doesn't know anything about 'real' time. All it seems to know about is grid time. IF you slow the grid, the MIDI data slow. If you speed the grid, the MIDI data speeds. But they remain locked to each other.

I think to fix this I need the MIDI data to TEMPORARILY act like audio data. The position and length of each MIDI event needs to stay locked in real time while I move the grid underneath it, much like the Identify Beat/Tempo Change we did before. Unfortunately, I cannot find a way to do this!

Do this experiment for me. Record 1 minute of MIDI data at 120BMP. Now, change the tempo to 60BPM. The data now takes two minutes to complete. Correct? (If not, then I did something wrong!!)

Now, figure out how to leave the tempo at 60BPM and grid exactly like you see it, but get the MIDI data back to where it plays in 1 minute. If you can do this then my problem is solved. (Except for the quantization/feel issues you bring up!)

Oh, and you're invited to Sir Elton's with me! [img]images/icons/wink.gif[/img]

Thanks,
Mark

[pk_hat]

Aaahh...

understood. Somehow I feel like I know the workaround to this problem but my light bulb is rather dim at the moment.
What you could do - for now - is get your midi piano back to where it was when first recorded, edit your velocity and other fine tuning, solo it and record it as audio right away.

I suppose that could do the jobby for now?
But, if you really want to impress Sir Elton, you could always re-record the part. It'll be time consuming but it will make you a better player and, who knows, an even better performance may come out of it!


pk

[Mark_Knecht]

pk,
Yep, both are possible. Most likely I will rerecord the piano today, but I'll continue to look for the answer.

Chalk this up to learning the right order to do things in, correct?

Thanks for all the help so far. If you remember how to do this, drop me a note!

Thanks,
Mark

BTW - I had one idea, but couldn't make it work. I wondered about exporting the MIDI data and then importing it into the new session but using the new sessions tempo. I thought this might align the MIDI events on the new tempo, but I couldn't get that to work either. Interesting idea though.

[B.Ray]

Mark,

I think you need to put your orginial piano part (recorded in the 120 BPM 4/4 time scheme) into "cut time". In other words, convert it from 4/4 to 2/4.

I'm not sure PTLE will allow two different time schemes in one session, so you may have to convert it to 2/4 time, play it in another sequencer and record that output (separate audio card & app) into PTLE. Then you can apply your tempo adjustments as necessary.

[stut5]

Mark, I have used the ID BEat function to add a keyboard part in sync to protools.I recorded on my Korg t-3 into the onboard seqencer (t-3) Then I midied it to protools out to T3 midi in clicked ID beat and it was synced right in line with Ptle.Hope this helps. Stu

[Mark_Knecht]

B.Ray & stut5,
I think you guys were on the right track. If I had a second sequencer, then I could let one play at 120 and let the other record at 77 and it would have worked.

B.Ray - searched around for a way to have two timebases in PTLE, but no way to do that, and cut time still didn't really put it at the right places...

As I have no extra outboard equipment though, so to move forward I just replayed it and am doing all the dirty edit work now.

Anyway, thanks for your suggestions.

Cheers,
Mark