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Had a gal come over with her guitar & recorded a song. I asked if she would like me to makes a BIAB backing track for her. She declined...She went home 2700 miles away & wrote & said she thought maybe a track would be a good idea.. I was told that there is a way for BIAB to pick up her Tempo & follow her voice & guitar.
If this is true, can someone walk me through this procedure.??
thanks.

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Quote:

Had a gal come over with her guitar & recorded a song. I asked if she would like me to makes a BIAB backing track for her. She declined...She went home 2700 miles away & wrote & said she thought maybe a track would be a good idea.. I was told that there is a way for BIAB to pick up her Tempo & follow her voice & guitar.
If this is true, can someone walk me through this procedure.??
thanks.




I suspect this will be difficult unless her timing is exact. More often singers with guitar take some liberties with timing when they perform. Which is why it is more common to lay vocals over the backing then place the backing behind the vocals. But you can try the ACW to get the chords (unless you know them) and then mess with styles, but I'd be surprized if you can get any decent results... But good luck.

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If she's not too far off, ACW should give you a tempo map from which you can generate the accompaniment. Chords will depend on what she did with the guitar...for example, if she's a finger picker (individual notes), ACW will have a hard time figuring out the chords versus if she strummed the chords. Of course, if you have the chord chart anyway, you can input it manually.


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Yes, as John and Jazzmandan said, you can use the audio chord wizard, not so much to get the chords in this case, but to enter the beats at each measure and thus create a tempo map. BIAB can then follow her timing. This assumes she can tell you the chords.


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Thanks, I suspected that the results wouldn't be great.. I wish she would have sung to a metronome, but she only wanted her & guitar.. She is too far away to do anything. If she would have had BIAB, then maybe we could still do it, .. lesson learned to at least have a click track.. Her tempo varies too much...
Thanks for your replies..

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Give it a try, though. It might work!


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There are two different approaches: either take a song with a varying tempo (not done to a click track) and you match audio/MIDI done to a click track and sync them up so they follow the track with varying tempo, or take a track done at one tempo (or varying tempo) and sync it to a steady beat at a different tempo.

I've found that generally it's more successful to "even out" an unsteady beat to a constant click. Mapping audio to a fluctuating tempo generally requires subdividing down to the beat level, which is pretty tedious. Even then, it doesn't sound that natural.

The process is pretty straight forward. Reaper is my DAW of choice, but only because it's what I'm most familiar with. I don't think you can do this in RealBand (yet) because it lacks some of the editing features. But I believe that some DAWs have tools to automate the job. My process is:
  • Figure out the "average" tempo of the song. BiaB's ACW tool is good for this.
  • Set the project's tempo to the desired tempo.
  • Import the audio into the Reaper.
  • Adjust the playback speed to 80% to increase accuracy.
  • Select the audio clip, and play it back. At the start of each measure, press "s" to slice the audio track.
  • When all the audio is sliced, set the playback tempo to 100%!
  • Turn on "Snap To Grid".
  • Go to the first measure of audio, and drag the left portion to the beginning of the measure, and let it snap it into place.
  • Hold down Ctrl+Alt and drag the right portion to the end of the measure, resizing it and snapping it into place. Ctrl+Alt allows the audio to stretch in time, but retain the same pitch. You've now resized the first measure to match the project's tempo.
  • Repeat for every measure in the song, promising yourself every couple of measures that next time you'll have them record the audio to click track.
  • Review the track at high magnification, looking for gaps that may have accidentally been added, and make sure everything is aligned as intended.
As I said, there's probably much easier ways to do this in other DAWs - this is just the method that I've used, and it works pretty well.

Once that's done, you can drop in tracks created in BiaB, and they'll sync up nicely.


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