Editing Tempo and Time Signature V4 in Cubase 12

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Editing Tempo and Time Signature V4 in Cubase 12

hello everybody Andrew Blake from the digitalaudiomanual.com today we move on to our fourth 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 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 so let's get into some Tempo and time signature we're now on this fourth video all previous videos in the navigation guide in the link below if you haven't seen what I'm about to show you I think you're really going to like it if you're someone like me that gets really impressed by super cool features that work very well so one of the things that Cubase can do in this discussion that we're having is bring in a piece of audio of some kind and actually do its own analysis on the tempo and write in the tempo changes as necessary so let me show you what I mean I'm going to go up to a track that I've got saved here a little Blues piece which I'm going to import and what it is is just a simple little guitar play in The Blues and if I turn on the click track I hope you can tell that those don't match so what we want to do is have Cubase figure out what the heck this thing is and match It ultimately being able to have the metronome click along with it so to do this basically we want to pick the audio we want to select it so I'm going to put my locators around it by hitting the letter P on my keyboard you can see it sets up this Loop up here in the top area at that point I'm going to go up to the project menu at the top here and come on down until I see the thing that says Tempo detection and you'll notice a couple things it is typed in the name of the clip that I'm going to analyze here and that's a good thing to pay attention to so you make sure that you're analyzing the right thing and that point from that point on I go to this button that says analyze and I click on that Cubase has a short analysis and it leaves us a bunch of options here on this panel we're not going to get into those right now we'll come back to those later but basically when things work well you don't have to mess with these so I'm just going to close this out for now and observe what's happened now it has put in a Tempo track if there wasn't one in my case I had a temple trick but it's actually written in all the little Tempo changes as you can see they're kind of fluctuating up and down it has also changed my cursor into a Time Warp tool but I'm not going to use that yet right away either I'm going to show you what we can do with that in a minute so I'm going to right click on that which changes it right back to a regular cursor again but now I'm going to go back to the beginning of the song and I'm going to play it with the click on and the click will kind of change a little bit until it locks into the song but listen to what happens when it gets into the song Here We Go and there it is right on it isn't that amazing these are the kind of things that just amaze me [Music] so now you can add drums or whatever you want because now it's synced to the temple so the thing to notice though where's the bug okay let's talk about the bug for a minute I'm going to move this track up to where it's by the temple track so let's look at this introduction where it takes a second to kind of get into the beat here it doesn't really it doesn't really act correctly right away at the beginning so I'm going to just play just the beginning you can see the temple track down here it's kind of moving around and I have a couple of clicks at the beginning of my song that it didn't match up to those clicks but as soon as the guitar got into the groove it really locked onto it so we have this area right in the beginning that's not so perfect and let's see how we can fix that let's play it one more time though and then it's on where it does come working is right here right in this area here it starts to lock on and from that point we're good so the problem is everything prior to that which really looks to me is just these clicks it didn't match these clicks so in order to fix these we got to go back to that time warp tool that's why the thing changed in the in the beginning because it was setting us up to go ahead and make the corrections so to get back to the time warp tool there's a couple ways you can get it but the easy way is I go up to my toolbar up on top there's a little button for the time warp I hit that it turns it back on and now it's just a matter of grabbing the little dots that it's put here as the grid and just moving them onto the clicks the ones that need it not the ones that don't so this first one right here I just put it over the little line I click on it and I drag it till it gets right to my click and move to the next one click on it drag that one in place and it's so graphically easy to see it's no big deal click the next one drag it right into place and then finally go to this first one click on it drag it right into place if I wanted to do anything with this very first one just to kind of keep the timing spaced properly I could kind of move that around if I wanted a little bit and now here's what we have right on the money so there you go and if that's not enough you can do it to more than one piece of audio I'm just going to repeat everything again and bring in another piece of audio here and now we have the second piece let me change this color a little bit so I'm going to take this and this doesn't have to be you know I use the same thing but it could be any piece of audio you want here I'll move it over here a little bit now I'm going to do the same things again I'm going to click on it to select it I'm going to hit the key with the letter P on the top to set my locators I'm going to go back up to the project I'm going to come down to Tempo detection and now inside the template detection it has changed the name to the new clip which again is very important so I know I'm fixing the right thing I'm going to go ahead and do an analysis and there it is you can never have more than one tempo track so what it did is it wrote the information on the original Temple trick and there you go so I could do this as much as necessary and what I'm trying to emphasize here is that if you have a song with multiple Temple changes in it that are very difficult to follow one solution is you can cut your audio up into smaller sections and then you can work on the tempo of those smaller sections because you have the ability to analyze independent pieces of audio just some extra bits of information when you're looking at these points they actually call them Tempo events but you can pick them with your mouse and drag them around if you need to but also notice that you can do some very fine adjustments if you need to up here on the info line where you can change the value or the curve type or where they start on the bar if you want to remove any of these particular points you can use your erase tool or select them and hit backspace all right so one more thing to talk about today this uh time scaling thing offers us a really good good option in terms of we can just like pick a particular range and have it be whatever we want for example my song right here maybe at the tempo it's at maybe I have 40 seconds worth of Music here but I'm called to use maybe exactly 30 seconds of it so what you want to do first of all is go up with your locators and pick what part of the music you wanted use for example I'll use this whole little piece that I'm working on right here then if I go to my Tempo track and hit the little button that says open the process Tempo dialogue right now it's telling me that the length of this piece is 52 seconds let's say I want to go up to 60 seconds that seems more logical so I'm going to spin that up to 60 seconds and hit process and now what it's done is change the tempo on the tempo track to give me exactly 60 seconds worth of music so when I hit this little piece of music now I'm going to get exactly 60 seconds worth [Music] as usual if you haven't grabbed your navigation guide be sure to grab that before you go there's links to all the content on this channel ever growing and free to use stare for your benefits there for my benefit I use a thing all the time I gotta tell you in my opinion this is one of the areas where Cubase really shines being able to take all the functionality and power of you know grid-based production and then apply it to non-grid-based you know where actual human beings are playing the music it's really some powerful tools we have here as we move to becoming more and more competent all the time [Music] so keep using your skills and I'll see you in the next video