Elastic Audio and/or Beat Detective with no click track?

[FordVan]

Is there a way to use Elastic Audio and/or Beat Detective without a click track, or drum machine track?

Let's say I have some live recordings, and the drummer was about the only guy nailing his parts. Can I use his tracks as a basis to line up the say guitar/bass/keys/horn tracks to match him better?

[Big Crouton]

absolutely. the easiest way I've found for situations like that is to tempo map the session to the drum tracks, at which point you can use elastic audio the same way as if the band had recorded to a click track.

For tempo mapping, you can get as picky or loose as you want, but I typically tab to transient for the downbeat of each bar in the song and use ctrl+I to set that as the start of each bar in the pro tools session.

I'd be happy to learn of quicker or more effective methods of tempo mapping, but that's how I go about it for tracks that didn't use a click.

[FordVan]

Thank you for the idea Big Crunchy Bread Crumb!

[nerhal]

I do everything the hard way. I don't get beat detective but know how to use elastic really well now. recently I recorded a friend who randomly did drums to no click. luckily he is consistent with his drums as far as hits and tempo but it obviously wasn't perfect. so I tap tempo what he played for each part and made tempo change markers for every part that was a different tempo and used elastic audio to line it up with the grid. turned out to be really easy and fast.