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#845715 03/10/25 09:18 AM
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So, let me get this straight. I've got the chords and a funky style that I like for a Dr. John tune. i'm only using the vocal stem after having defined the barline in ACW.

However, the vocal sounds like it's dragging at times. i'm thinking that if I go back into ACW, tweak the barlines tighter to the vocal, and apply Equalize Tempo, the rhythm section should stay consistent and stretch the vocal to be more in time.

Okay, well, I tried it and it seems to work. However, I've got the same problem with a second tune that I want to stitch on the end of this one. However, doing the same thing causes a problem. This song has a bar of 2/4 in each chorus. I changed those particular bars in question to 2 beats using Bar Settings. This doesn't seem to work correctly, stretching the vocal at that point. How can I make this happen?

Last edited by Funkifized; 03/10/25 09:39 AM.

Band-in-a-Box® for Windows
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With the second tune, if you used ACW with that, you can set the 2-beat bar in ACW. Just right click on the bar line.

Also, when you set the 2-beat bar in BIAB, did you change the tempo or did BIAB change the tempo automatically? Bars with two beats should be the same tempo as the main song.


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With the vocal stem playing, the tempo of the enabled style is altered to fit the 2/4 bar in a bar of 4, which sounds terrible. However, I did as you suggested, changed the measure to 2 beats in ACW, but then had to go to Bar Settings to fix the "Change the Tempo by xx", where I changed it to zero. That worked.

What I'm having problems with is putting together a demo of New Orleans tunes that have more of a two-beat feel, but I want to change to a 16th-note shuffle in 4. When I define the bars in ACW, counting 4 makes the measures twice as long. I go back and try to tighten up the barlines with the vocal, but the vocals may be a little loose timing-wise, due to originally being sung over a two-beat feel. I get go through the whole tune, getting the barlines to match as closely to the vocal performance as I can, but then apply Equalize Tempo, to try to match tempos between two different songs that I want to put together.

Doing this seems to get the vocals to sound late and off from the groove. My idea is to find a vocal phrase that comes in lazy and to move the barline to where the vocal starts. This may make the rhythm section elongate and tempo sound slower, but then I Equalize Tempo to tighten them up to proper tempo.

This isn't necessarily working as well as I would like. Vocal stem gets behind the beat a lot, and this whole process has somehow completely gotten the Master Stem and the Vocal Stem out of synch with each other. I'm muting the Master Stem anyway, only using the Vocal Stem, but I'm guessing that there might be a better way to do this. The vocalists sound drunk because they're all over the place, phrasing-wise.

What to do?


Band-in-a-Box® for Windows
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RealBand 2026 (4)
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Interestingly, I just used ACW and Equalize Tempo on a song that has 2 measures in it that are 2 beats long while the rest of the song is 4 beats. I figured I was going to have to edit it but it automatically picked up on those 2 measures and assigned them 2 beats.

I use the ET function when a song has slight variations in the tempo. I tend to play the song and use the L key to insert the bar lines on the 1 beat. You can go back and edit or move those lines if you missed the 1 by a bit. I find that if I simply tell it to ET it seems to do it rather well. It forces everything into the same tempo with stretching the audio to match the tempo. If you are really close it's totally transparent. So if the tempos of the measures are lets say..... 99.5, 99, 100.2, 100.5, 99.8, and you select 100 as the equalization tempo, you shouldn't hear a difference but it will now line up for the use of midi in a DAW because it's no longer variating, but now rock solid on 100BPM.

I'm still spending more time on working on this than I would like. In other words, I'm still learning and figuring this out. I only recently started using the ACW and the addition of ET was a game changer. After the ACW and ET does it's thing, I go back to the main screen and fix the chords and apply the proper structure to the song using markers.


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