Editing Tempo and Time Signature V3 in Cubase 12

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Editing Tempo and Time Signature V3 in Cubase 12

hello everybody Andrew Blake from the digitalaudiomanual.com today we move on to our third video as we continue to discuss editing Tempo and time signature in Cubase 12. but before we start I want to remind you that there's a link below to the free content navigation guide which is an easy to navigate webpage with links to all the content on this channel and besides that in the near future I'm going to begin adding tips and other bits of information that will only be available there you know things like simple steps that will get you started and up and running quick things that are in the videos but are written down in simple steps that serve as quick reminders when you need information down the road if you're working with programs like wavelab or Cubase plugins or the cable guys shaper Box 2 and many many other projects that are in the works then I know you're going to find just like I have that this is an invaluable study Aid and the other thing I want to make sure you understand is that this is not a simple PDF this is a constantly updated page that has any info information that is new or anytime videos are changed really anything updated and once you have it you will always have the latest information constantly updated so if you haven't gotten it already go to the link below click on it and save it to your favorites it's my gift to you and it's absolutely free Okay so let's get started all right so we're on this third video now and all the previous videos as usual are in the navigation guide in the link below but let's start out looking at this option to record Tempo changes right in the tempo track itself so there's a couple ways you can always open up the tempo track itself you know hit Ctrl T if you haven't changed your shortcuts we can go up to the project and come right down there's an option that says Tempo track which brings up this Temple track editor which we've looked at a little bit already but what we're interested in right now is going up onto the toolbar and there's a little button that says open the temple recording panel let me hit that and we get this little button here that also has a little slider below it and the button says start recording and if I hit this button it's basically going to start playing my project and then if I move the slider it's going to change the tempo so let's have a shot at this here we go I'm going to hit the button I'm going to start by slowing it down a little bit and you can see it's drawing in Tempo changes [Music] let me speed it back up I'm just dragging it with my mouse [Music] foreign [Music] if I go back and just select that area and hit the spacebar to play it now [Music] there you go pretty amazing okay so now this is something that probably everybody at one point or another is either going to want to do has done or is going to be expected to do and that's the concept of getting a song a piece of audio of some kind and having to bring it into Cubase with no idea of what the tempo is and you want to get the tempo to lock to it so you can do something to it in a Cubase project I have this little snippet of a song here we're going to try to keep it somewhat simple forever forever forever now granted I tried to find something that has relatively some kind of template to it it's not so freestyle that it's like slowing down and speeding up radically all over the place what we're gonna do the concept is going to be the same and it's good to start out simple and then you can take the principles from there but for example if I play this little piece of audio and I turn my click track on The Click track although in some ways it sounds like it is it has really has nothing to do with this song It Doesn't it's not keeping the Beat It doesn't even know what the beat is so my click track is going to do me no good right now so to pull this off the next thing we have to do is we have to bring some kind of instrument in here that has a some kind of click sound that we can use to tap out a Tempo I have found you know the more generic the better so I'm going to use this like hi-hat sound and as I've said many times in many other videos I keep a keyboard connected to my computer so you know I can do these kind of things because I actually have some kind of midi trigger device so the next thing we have to do is whatever track we're going to use to make that click we want to go up into the inspector with a little musical linear toggle button is here for me it's a lit up yellow I'm going to click that and it turns into what looks like a little clock and that stands for the linear time which basically means it's not going to follow Temple tracks or anything right now it's just all freestyle and by the same token if I haven't done it on my original imported audio file here I want to make sure that's on linear as well so the first thing we need to accomplish is we have to get the click recorded from my midi track and try to get it to match this song so what I would do is I would break this down into small pieces maybe make a little Loop section of a little area I'm going to Loop that part [Music] I'm going to turn the click off that's not gonna do us any good [Music] so once I kind of identify something that I can at least feel some kind of tempo to I would probably practice a few times trying to get a feel going just like any drummer would foreign [Music] something like that trying to get it as close as I can to whatever I'm hearing if I mess up you know again just try to get as close as I can I'll try to fix what I have to later with the midi parts all right I'm gonna start recording this another important thing is you want to make sure that you turn any kind of quantities off because if you have quantize on it's going to you know try to move these click things to the wrong spot so everything's got to be freestyle so quantize off [Music] and I don't know [Music] once I get something going I'd check it out see how it sounds [Music] pretty good and I would just keep going that way until I get this whole song All right so I kind of roughed it in I balanced it a few times with my different takes forever forever [Music] Chloe you get the idea now we have to kind of you know like the lead in here this part comes in and that's like totally a disaster so what I would have to do obviously the better they are locked on the better when this finally comes to adjusting the tempo it's going to adjust it correctly but the next questions are where does this start you know that's the thing that comes to my mind where is beat number one you know where does it really hit and that's the thing I'm missing right now when I start this thing from the beginning you know she comes in singing and then my clicks kind of figure their way into it so I have to find a way to get my clicks to match right up at the very very beginning here and a couple of ways come to my mind to do that one would be to open this editor up and you know really zoom in on the the area that I want to lock into which is the beginning part here and then I could set up a loop you know over just a few of these notes because it's real critical that I get it at the beginning right foreign so those are all good right there those come in good so I'm hearing her singing right here getting this first one to lock where I want it to be [Music] that's pretty good so again you know figuring out where it's going to actually start because that's going to be important but the problem is too still so I would want to get you know a four count coming into this I would definitely wouldn't want to start my project right where she starts singing like that I'd want to have some kind of lead into this and because I've already kind of gotten some Tempo going later on down the line here I would just take a snippet of something like that make a selection of that hold my ALT key drag it out of there so then I have at least a piece of time that I know is already kind of in sync to the tempo of this whole thing and then I would kind of work that into trying to make it all fit together here and I only want a four count in so I'll take everything off but the four that I want so I know that this piece right here is in time at least with the with the audio that I'm working with so it's just a matter of trying to slide this in here in some way that I am happy with how it lines up [Music] that's pretty good forever so there you go that's one way to deal with it that click's got to really match the best you can freestyle before it's gonna do anything else now another thing that comes to my mind on a solution to this you know again when you're trying to deal with it is you know we have this edit in place option on most of these tracks so like this instrument I can click on this edit in place and it gives me kind of a more even visual of where things are and then I can kind of move these notes so you know that's an option too but actually I can even without the edit in place I can kind of see where they're at here foreign there we go so again you can see how much you know it depends how much detail you want to put into the whole thing so step one is you gotta freestyle some kind of click in here to the best of your ability and the better you do it the better your result is going to be as we go to this next step I've got a four click in and then it starts to line up so let's see how we did here [Music] forever [Music] all right so that's the first thing you have to accomplish if you're going to do this kind of a thing where all you've got to have is a untempled audio to work with all right so assuming we got our tapping working the way we want to match our audio the best we can come up with the next step is we want to select this midi part and then we want to go up to our midi menu move on down to where we see functions and then the sub menu there all at the bottom it says merge the tempo from tapping all right merge Tempo from tapping we're going to take that option click on it then we have this screen that shows up the temple from tapping and we have to make some kind of critical decisions here the first one is it shows the tapping and when it comes in here it says one bar but it gives us all these options eighth quarter note half two bar what this is referring to is where were your Taps were you tapping on each bar were you tapping on each quarter note that's what I was doing you want to fill that information in so I'm going to say each quarter note because that's what I was doing and then you have another option where it says begin at bar start so if we check that it's going to assume that you're starting right from the beginning of a bar otherwise it's going to kind of freestyle its way into it but let's go ahead and say yeah started at the beginning of a bar and let's hit OK a couple of things have occurred once I hit OK the first thing is when I look down at my Tempo original Tempo down here on the bottom on the transport when I started this song it was like at 109 or something like that it was very slow and now it is showing me a tempo of about 130 so it has definitely bumped up the tempo to something else we're going to play it here forever and I'm going to turn the click on now and that click is now spot on with that hi-hat which is nothing short of amazing in my opinion [Music] so that's what it's done it's created a temple grid [Music] and it's lined right up that's really amazing all right so now let's look at our Tempo drag so I hit Ctrl T if you look at the tempo track look at it it's all over the place see this all of this stuff it's kind of adjusting as the song adjusts up and down up and down up and down if we observe one more thing as this is playing along [Music] and you look at the actual Tempo you can see that the temple is changing fluctuating up and down little in little bits as this as it as it reads through the song [Music] just for fun let's put a drum loop on this and see how it works [Music] that's pretty good you know again I mean as much as you put into getting that click there initially is going to make a difference in how well this works but that's pretty good [Music] yep all right well there you go we're gonna end it right there so as usual you haven't grabbed your navigation guide be sure to grab that before you go it has links to all the content on this channel ever growing free to use this is just another one of those videos on the list this is quite a feature for sure if you have you know something that um you know you need to put drums to or other parts I guess we'll look at how to get chords in it as we go longer but um you know anything you need to lock in this is definitely an option but there's many more so we're going to explore them I will leave you with this [Music] you guys have a great one I'll see you on the next video