Cubase Pro Essentials for Film Composers-The Time Warp Tool!

Jeff Gibbons here with another Cubase basics tutorial for film composers on the time warp tool I've been using Cubase for film and video composition for a long time and the time work tool is definitely an indispensable part of my workflow I like to make sure that all of my music is done to the click track so what that means is I need to make the click track work with whatever is happening in the video so what I will do is I will set up hit points in a marker track of these important moments where I need the music to wrap up by a certain point and then what I can do with the timer tool is I can take the bars and beats and stretch them or compress them so that they line up perfectly with the hit points so I may choose to important hit points and say I need a chunk of music that goes exactly between these two points I will start playing around to something find a tempo that sort of works and then I will push that tempo or pull out that tempo so that it lines up perfectly and musically makes sense to have say a four-bar phrase or something like that that wraps up at exactly the right time so the first thing you need to do is go set up hit points in the software what I'm showing you here is a video that my wife and I created for a company called BioPod and so we made the whole video we shot the video we wrote the video and I did the music for it this isn't the music that I used in the video coming up with something new here using Steinberg's iconic Orchestra so I'm using mostly iconic ax in this little video but let's start with this video and look at what happens in the very beginning and we'll start setting out hit points so it starts out there's been a lot of death in our family recently it all started with our goldfish clog glub I came home one day to find him doing the backstroke we paid our respects and gave him a proper burial yesterday owners playing around with a new music idea I came up with this little accordion thing and I was playing on that glub-glub thing so the glub-glub and what I want to do is have his glub-glub hit at the musical point where the accordion would normally be doing the glub-glub so what I need to do is first off isn't is nail that hit point down and just to remind you how to make a marker track you go up to project add track marker right here and I'm gonna drop a marker right in at glub-glub and then to name it make sure this information line is open and if it's not just click this little gear right here and turn on info line and then now I can click on that marker and go over to where it says description and give it a name so we're gonna call this glub glub and then the next marker or the next hit point that I want to hit in this video I came home one day to find him doing the backstroke is the bathroom so I'm gonna put another marker right here so I want some kind of this whole musical piece to kind of wrap up once we go to the new scene so change of scene change of music and it might be a variation of the same music but whatever I just want it to change right there so what I need to do is find that point and because of the new edit mode in Cubase which is brand new Cubase Pro 10 only in Cubase Pro 10 what I can do is turn on use video follows edit mode so I just have a kikah managed to shift key for that so I press shift e I lose my regular project cursor and what I can do now is grab this marker and move it and as soon as I get to that point the frames update as I move so this new feature I have a video on it as well so now I can click on that marker right there and call this bathroom there we go so I've got two points I know I want glub-glub to work with the music clog club so I'm gonna have my accordion kind of being at that tempo already [Music] so that's gonna be one two three four and you can see at the default tempo of 120 beats per minute I'm already pretty close to that Club so now I can right-click for the timer tool and there's a couple things you need to know about the time work tool one is you drop in markers by clicking anywhere vertically this way along in your project so I can click overtop of an event and grab and move a bar I can click in empty space and grab a bar and I can grab individual beats so you see what I'm doing I'm just grabbing bars right now and I am moving the tempo as I move this marker point that I just dropped in the tempo for this part is changing so if i zoom in right there you'll see what I mean so I click there and you can see that tempo as I pull it out it's getting slower and as I push it in it's getting faster you just click and drag with the mouse anywhere to drop in a marker as long as your snap is on you can also shift and click on top of a marker and it will turn into a very tiny eraser so now I can click and erase these little markers that I've dropped in so that's the way to enter and get rid of markers and then the other thing you need to understand is the way the time work tool functions and that leads us to something a little bit more complicated which is this little button right here and this idea that MIDI notes and sound effects and things like that can live according to beats per minute or it can live according to minutes and seconds so when you have any any events that are put on a track and they are locked to a musical note or musical time base this moment in time this glub-glub effect is happening at bar 3 almost beat 4 now that's not what we want because if I change the tempo glub-glub the marker goes with it but you see that it no longer lines up with glub-glub the sound effect because glub-glub the sound effect is locked to a moment in time so when we enter markers in we always want to make sure that this little button on my marker track is turned to the clock which is linear time base or which is minutes and seconds so now watch what happens if I grab the timer tool and I move a bar you see that glub-glub the marker here stays where it is but the cool thing is down here this information my node information which I've already played in if I go back if I unmute this watch what happens now if I take the time work tool and click and drag you see that the notes stretch out so things get slower as I pull to the right and this information gets faster as I pull to the left here so let's have a look and if I stretch it out okay so this is how the time warp tool works now the other thing that I have clicked on the time work tool is right now it says warp the grid and musical events follow so that means anything with a musical time base is going to follow it as I push and pull the tempo so when I'm working on a chunk of music that I want to stretch or compress as I moved with a time work tool I want to make sure that it's on musical time base and I also want to make sure that warp grid is on musical events follow what I would recommend is leaving on musical events follow start warping your grid to match where you want your bars and beats to line up and then play things to your click track that you've now set up let's have a listen to this let's take this bar for I need beat to a bar for to be where it says glub-glub so it's going to go glub glub so that's where I need barf or beat to to line up to so what I'm gonna do is erase this little marker just by holding shift and clicking and then I grab bar for beat two and I'm gonna pull it over so that it lines up with the word glub glub and I can even zoom in a little bit right there if I want to get a little bit more specific so there's the word glub glub and I've got a marker right there and it's just pushed the tempo a little bit so that it's now 118 beats per minute instead of 101 so watch what happens I've started with our goal so every time you enter in a new time time work point all you're doing is dropping into another point on the tempo track so the time work tool works in conjunction with the tempo track and so what I would also recommend is adding go to a project add track and go to tempo and now we can see how we're dropping in these markers so I'm gonna go and delete these points right here with the time work tool on and if the time work tool wasn't on you could always just select these points with a box and delete them that way but I go back to the time art tool and we can see this one marker right here that we pulled so that it lines up with glub glub right so if I do this again you see how the tempo track is stretching and pulling leaving this marker here at 101 beats per minute in order to make this line up so that the music ends at bar 6 you can see that we've had to slow the tempo way down and if you were to compose music and have the tempo change every 2 or 3 bars just so that it lines up with another scene or something like that it would sound really bad so what we need to do here is we need to figure out a different way because listen to the tempo of the song here started with our gold Club I came home one day to find out doing the backstroke and I wanted to go on to the next scene so clearly I don't want to have a totally new musical idea for that bar and a half that is slower so I need to figure out another way to keep my music going after the word glub glub have it be it roughly the same tempo as the beginning and then have it line up with the word bathroom so these are all of these puzzles that you face as a film composer what we need to do here is figure out a way to have this music continue after the word glub glub but to not have to change the tempo so drastically so let's just undo that last marker and we can see already that bar 6 beat two lines up with the word bathroom so what I'm going to do here to show you how we can change time signature with the time signature track so another track go up the project add track and we're gonna go to signature and now we see this time signature track and we can get out of the time work tool and we can drop in time signature changes just with the pencil or with the option click so I'm gonna go like this I'm gonna say AB bar for I want this bar to have an extra beat because of the word glub-glub I'm gonna put a little space there and it's gonna work out just fine so I'm going to turn the snap on we're gonna drop in a time signature change right there and all you have to do is type five four so what I've done is I've created a bar of 5/4 but you see it continues on 5/4 for the rest of the song that's not gonna work really well so what I'll do is I'll drop in another change of 4/4 back at bar five so now we have five four four one bar and then it goes back to 4/4 and now we can see bar six is lining up nicely with the marker for the bathroom so what I need to do now is take my time work tool and you can see I've got point a tempo point locked in at beat two right there so watch what happens I grab this and drag it over just a little bit now it lines up perfectly with the marker that takes us into the bathroom so listen to this to the click home one day to find him doing the backstroke so now everything lines up and that's just the puzzle that you're always faced when you're writing music for film is that you are locking your music to something that is time sensitive so you have to somehow make your music fit into the restrictions that are placed on you by the video and really it's about doing something specific but something that musically makes sense you know to just go from a 4 4 to 5 4 to 6 4 2 4 4 it just would feel awkward so you still have to have it make musical sense so here is what I did after that moment answering the snap back on okay so for this one what I did is I want this music to start right here so we have glub-glub we have one extra beat where I made that 5 4 and then we do do-do-do do-do-do and it takes us into one more bar of the music which wraps up perfectly at the bathroom I came home one day to find him doing the bathroom okay so here is the project with a bunch of other instruments in it let's have a listen to just the music added some strings they're all pizza kado [Music] you know the accordion a glockenspiel added some drums and a bassoon a contra bassoon and a flute up top so let's have a listen to all of them [Music] okay so there it is now here's another interesting point once you have your time markers set out you can hear right now that this tempo is if I click on that little tiny dot right there let me see the tempo is 112 for the last part and the tempo here is 118 it's a little too drastic so if I want this tempo to match the tempo of the beginning let's go to the time work tool I can see the tempo is 118 right here and 113 right here I've also got a marker that locks right there so if I scrub through this you'll see it hits the bath the bathroom scene change right there which is perfect I don't want that to move I just need to take the time work tool and move where this music kicks back in so here's the word glub glub glub glub I came home I can make that gap even a little bit longer by dropping in a tempo point right here watch what happens when I click and drag I'm gonna move this over and look at what happens to the tempo I can set this now so that this tempo right here goes back to 118 because that's where it was at the beginning so 118 it was too slow so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click right here and drag out till it goes up to approximately 118 and you'll see as I move this one over it doesn't touch this marker all it does is it makes this tempo faster right here and on the other side in between it and the next tempo event it gets slower so this gets faster this gets slower as I move this back and forth I'm gonna set it so that this point right here goes back to 118 and I don't really care how slow this one is right here on the gap because we're just gonna be like the conductor just kind of held that for a moment and then went on right so let's grab this marker move it over to 118 oops 118 right there and then watch what happens when I press play clock Club I came home one day to find him doing the bats there we go wraps up perfectly let's have a listen to the whole thing now there's been a lot of death in our family recently it all started with our goldfish club I came home one day to find him doing the backstroke so this is how I approach all of my video composition film composition projects I always use the marker track and the beauty of that is I can take this whole section of music and copy and paste it over to a new section maybe change the instruments but you've got all your themes now and they're all locked to the grid so hopefully that explains the time work tool a little bit better it's a very confusing thing when you first start working with it but for me it is essential so make sure you hit the subscribe button and go to Givens creative dot c8 to see what else I do and thanks for watching

Channel: Jef Gibbons

Views: 29,987

Keywords: Cubase, Cubase Pro, Cubase Pro 10, Cubase Composing, Film Composing, Composing for film, Time Warp Tool, Time Warp, Jef Gibbons, Gibbons Creative, Original Soundtrack Creation, Film Composer, Music for video, Cubase Master, Cubase Tips, Cubase Tips and Tricks, Cubase Tutorial, Cubase Basics, Cubase Getting Started

Id: tArYK2D2DAU

Length: 16min 24sec (984 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 10 2019