Automatic tempo detection and correction

hi in this video i'm going to take a look at automatic tempo detection in cubase so let's go [Music] [Applause] [Music] so recently i was working on a remix of an old wash song called inner drive that we played live like many many years ago on a national holiday called queen's day at the time which is the birthday of our queen or king as we have now and that's generally a day in which there's lots of live music so while working on this mix i noticed that our tempo was not quite steady during the whole song and although it doesn't really bother me i thought the export of this mix so stereo track would be a nice example of how i would go about putting a stereo track on the grid so let's first have a look to the beginning of this track so that you have an idea without any tempo detection or correction so this is the current stereo mix of the track [Music] so i don't know if you notice but the tempo doesn't actually stay very constant the drummer counts it in at 95 but then it quickly deviates let me turn on the click track and listen again [Music] so we immediately slow down in the first measure after the count in already now i will first show you how to do manual tempo detection because i think it helps to understand the automatic detection and correction that we're going to do later on so hang in there to manually put this on the grid we can use the time warp tool which allows us to put in warp markers and move them over the music so for example i want this to be exactly on b2 so i can put in a warp marker here at b2 and i can drag the start of that measure to exactly where you can see the waveform is at its peak same thing for measure three measure four measure five measure six seven and so on so let's check that click is now on the beat [Music] yeah so you notice that the click track is now quite on the beat but i haven't actually corrected anything yet i've just detected the tempo of the audio and especially the change in the tempo on the audio because when you look at the tempo track now by pressing ctrl t you can see the tempo varies in every measure that i put a warp marker in front of and if you look at the top you can also see the variations in tempo next to the wall markers and if you play it again and you look at the tempo indication on the bottom right here you can also see that the tempo varies with every measure [Music] now you can actually do this for the whole song just put warp markers in on every measure throughout the whole song i think there's like probably about 100 messages in the whole song so it's quite doable it'll probably take what 15 minutes or so and you'll have quite an accurate tempo map maybe even more accurate than when you do it the automatic way but the automatic way is of course even faster but it's a bit more finicky so let me show you that now okay so i first want to get a bit of the warp marker that i put in manually because cubase will do that for us automatically in a minute and to get rid of the warm markers i click shift and then my mouse pointer turns into an eraser and i can just get rid of the warp markers that i already put in and i go back to my normal object selection tool and then select the audio event that i want to use for tempo detection and i go to project tempo detection and you can see that you get this little panel here being the tempo detection panel so it always starts with pushing analyze and as you can see cubase has added a signature track it has turned on time warp mode again and it has put in warp markers for us in positions in the music that it detects a beat and it has also inserted tempo changes automatically over the whole track so let's listen to this so what you notice is that manually i put in one warp marker for each measure and cubase has now put in a warp marker for every eighth note at the moment now i think that's a bit too much i probably want it for every beat so the tempo detection panel then provides you the option to divide the detected warp markers by two so let's do that and you can see that there's now one warp marker for every quarter note for every beat basically now if the tempo detection has done some other weird things like it detected the beats too slowly then you can also multiply it by two if it didn't detect your triplet feel or overdetect the triplet field you can also use these two multiplications over here sometimes if you have a bit of weird rhythm cubase detects the offbeat and then you can use offbeat detection to correct that and you can also smooth out the tempo detection that it has done but apparently cubase feels that this is smooth enough because it's disabled at the moment now let's check again now if the click track is now on the beat [Music] okay there was something weird around here so at this moment you can stay in the tempo detection mode and correct the wall markers for example this one seems to be a bit late so i can drag it a bit to the left and watch what happens in the tempo track if i now release the mouse button you can see that also subsequent warp markers have been changed a little so let's listen to this again so it's better not perfect but this is one of the things that i mean with the finicky part you really have to go through it to see if the wall markers have been put in correct locations for your music and sometimes they will be off and you need to correct them manually but suppose we've done that now for this whole track then i can turn off the tempo detection just close the panel and i now want to correct my signature track because obviously this is not correct either these are just regular 4 4 measures and let's listen again [Music] so let's now assume that we have fully detected tempo in this track either manually or by the automatic tempo detection with some manual corrections so let's now move on on how to actually correct the audio so that it is running on a steady tempo because we don't want to have a different tempo at every beat like we have now so we can do that by going to audio advanced set definition from tempo and then we get this dialog and we can now save the found tempo changes in the project or even in the audio files and it would be useful to write the definition to the audio files itself if we want to use those audio files in another project for example but in this case we're going to stay with this project so we're going to save the definition in the project and i also it automatically selects that we want to set all tracks to musical time base meaning that they will stay in time with whatever we change in the tempo of the song so let's do that over here you can see the note that indicates that it's now in musical time base and what we can now do is we don't need the tempo track anymore so we can just get rid of the tempo track and use a steady tempo definition for example if you want to play this always at tempo 92 we can now just play this song at 10.92 and cubase will stretch the audio to keep it in sync [Music] to show you that this really makes a difference let's put it to a much quicker tempo [Music] yeah so this is the way i would correct a stereo track and put it on the grid if i wanted to of course which would not be the case for this song now there's a couple of caveats that you need to take into account for example on this track later on in this track the beats are not so obvious so cubase automatic tempo detection had quite a lot of trouble to find the beats exactly so in that case it could also help if you have a separate drum track of this track which because i just made the mix i do so i could have also imported the separate drum track in this project and done the automatic tempo detection on just a drum track or even maybe just on the kick track just to make it a bit easier for cubase to detect where exactly the beats are now another thing that's good to know if you want to use this automatic tempo detection in cubase is that it doesn't really work very well in other sample rates at least part of it doesn't really work very well and that's the part where you manually correct the automatic tempo detection while still staying in the tempo detection mode let me show you over here with the 48 kilohertz project so this is the exact same song and if you look at the pool it's now a 48 kilohertz file my project is also set up for 48 kilohertz so let's do a tempo detection again we need to divide it by two and let's listen to this part that we had to manually correct in the 44 kilohertz example as well so when you listen to this it is way more often in the 44 kilohertz track but if i want to now pull this warp marker forward for example like this and i release it you see that there's a big jump here between 21 and 22 which doesn't make sense at all so this is actually a bug which has been reported on the cubase forum as well and i'll link the forum thread in the description and it has been a bug for quite a number of years already and it hasn't been fixed in cubase pro 11 yet so let's hope for cubase 12. there is a bit of a work around but it's not quite satisfactory let me show you let me undo this change and now i need to close the tempo detection panel and now i'm actually able to move the warp markers without any problems however you see that there is no reassessment of the warp markers further down the line like there was when you have the tempo detection still enabled now you really have to move all individual warp markers in a way that makes sense to get them on the beat now if you like this video or found it useful please give it a thumbs up subscribe to the channel and ring little bell icon so you know when i post another video and if you want to support the channel even more you can click on one of the affiliate links in the description and if you purchase anything at those stores i'll get a small commission without any extra cost to you now i also did a video on the basics of tempo in cubase but i bet you there are some basics that you didn't know about yet check it out over here enjoy it and see you soon [Music] you

Channel: Lanewood Studios

Views: 32,221

Keywords: Music Production, Home Studio, Music Producer, how to, music production software, music production for beginners, mixing studio, home recording, recording studio, Cubase, lanewood studios, daw, awash, awashmusic, cubase pro, cubase artist, cubase tips, cubase 11, cubase 11 pro, cubase pro 11, youtube tutorials, tempo track, cubase tempo, cubase tempo track, cubase tempo change, musical tempo, tempo detection, tempo correction, tempo detection panel, cubase time warp tool

Id: WfkA604PfwU

Length: 12min 1sec (721 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 04 2022