Thanks for the tip Bob. All other songs I've done in BIAB that has been my exact workflow. This one was just giving me fits.

I have received Charlie's generous work on a BIAB file using my audio file. I will post his workflow for creating the song file below. May help someone else in the future?

I had one chance to run the song as I've been out of town. From what I seen it looks fantastic. I will comment more when I've had more time to work with it.

As you will see in Charlie's comments on his workflow, the tempo drift was a real issue. This is the first time I recorded a "scrub" track in an attempt to glean information about tempo and time signature. It appears to me NOW that is maybe a bad thing to do? I believe that is why I struggled so much with this?

The goal was to make a scrub track that I could use in BIAB to create a backing track with the same general feel. Then record the guitar to the backing track, which for me playing with the drums prevents much tempo drift. Seems that wasn't such a good idea??

Here's Charlie's workflow and comments:

Well, it wasn’t too hard. My guess to you having issues is that the song starts out quite slowly and it’s several bars into the tune before the tempo levels out although the tempo stills drifts throughout the song. I kept note of the steps I took to analyze the song and will list them for you. This is my workflow and each step is not necessary, it’s just how I do it.

I first opened the song in Audacity for my initial listen as well as examine the wave form.
In Audacity, I prepped the song in the way I have developed songs so there is consistency in my workflow and in the song form in regard to beginning, ending and volume level. For your song, I added several seconds of silence at the beginning, applied a slight fade in and then trimmed the intro into the song with just a touch more of silence before the start than your mp3 had. I also faded the last held chord and faded it into silence and trimmed the ending to the last full second. I exported the Audacity edited version of your song as a WAV file and saved it with a different name than the mp3 you sent to me. All of my work on the song in the BIAB program was done using the Audacity edited version of your song and not the original mp3 you sent.

I opened BIAB and imported the song using the Open icon. I opened the song in Audio Edit and listened to the song from beginning to end while the BIAB Style was disabled. I only listened to the imported audio and examined the WAV form and manually counted the tempo and visually lined up bars without actually marking any.

Listening to the song while visually looking at the WAV form benefits me with deciding the proper location of the beginnings of bars. So, from listening while looking, I determined the song tempo did not level off until bars 3-4

I closed the Audio Editor, killed the Audio and Opened a New Project of BIAB without saving the current project.

I imported your song into the New Project using the ACW radio button icon. This is the older version of the ACW and not the newer version that runs within the BIAB program from the Audio Editor. I could have used either but because with your song, there was a wide varying of tempo, the older version has colored markers across the top that are very useful and easier for me in some cases to accurately determine where bars should be located. Both work, I thought the older version would be easier for me with your song.

With the song open in the ACW, I did not immediately set the first bar at the beginning of the song (F6). Rather, I set a bar where the WAV form indicated what I had earlier determined to be bar 3 where the song tempo began to level when I had first listened to the song in BIAB with the Audio Editor open. It’s from that point that I used the F8 key to manually mark bars. Using my manual settings, the ACW calculated the beginning bars preceding my start from bar 3 as well as providing its determination of the first bar downbeat. The ACW calculated the first bar to be a few ticks prior to your first chord voicing. Essentially, the ACW calculated that in an actual count in situation, you were late on your count by a few ticks. That worked for me and the ACW had accurately analyzed your song in a single pass. I could deal with the song beginning once I was working on the song in BIAB. Allowing the ACW AI to coordinate with my manual input worked marvously for both bar detection and chord analysis. I accepted the ACW analysis for the first two bars, the ACW chord analysis, tempo map and chord detection and imported the song into BIAB.

With the default BIAB Style ZZJazz disabled, I auditioned your analyzed song playing to the BIAB generated chord chart and tempo map. Everything synced ok.

I opened the StylePicker and filtered my search to the feel, time signature, RealTracks Style only in the Folk genre and found a ballad that had the instrumentation that seemed to work for me to test with.

Knowing nothing about your idea for the actual song, I did not spend anytime searching and simply chose a style that would play along with your recorded guitar and I also wanted to add a instrument to play a melody.

That said, I did not attempt to spend anytime on locating a drum kit. Honestly, that would likely be difficult to find and also would likely only work with either a live performance of a drummer playing along with your recorded audio or the use of midi drums to edited to play and follow your guitar performance. You strumming is not consistent enough to align with drum beats. I muted the drums and did not use any RT strumming or Fingerpicked guitar, again because of the inconsistent strumming.

I did use a RT strumming guitar to expand the stereo field and play against your opposite panned guitar audio recording but I only used the RT strumming held chords on the first beat of bars.

To address the entry of your first guitar hit being a few ticks late and also the big discrepancy in tempo for the first few bars, I muted all BIAB instruments and allowed your guitar audio track to solo for the song intro. Using BIAB Bar Settings (F5), I introduced the BIAB instruments spreading their entry into the song over several bars.

Focusrite 2i2 2nd Gen
Windows 10 pro 1709 16299.125
Intel core i7 6700k CPU @ 4.00GHz 4.01 GHz
16 gig memory
BIAB UltraPak version is 2023 (Latest)
Cubase pro 9