Tempo Matching Audio V1 in Cubase 12

hello everybody andrew blake from thedigitalaudiomanual.com today we're going to begin digging into the subject of tempo matching audio 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 plug-ins or the cable guys shaperbox 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 there's a whole bunch of options and features in cubase for matching audio to the tempo or extracting the tempo you're going to hear terms like musical mode and free warp and these kind of things so we're going to get into a lot of this kind of stuff and tear it apart so anytime you bring audio in the cubase like i have this loop right here and when you click on it you get again this whole menu of stuff that opens up up here on the top and one of the things that opens up way over on the end here on the right are these things they call warping algorithms for audio and when you click on it you get the elastic ones and you get the standard ones and they're just uh you know a set of different options some are set for pitch some are set for time you know and they kind of do different things the standard one like there's one in here for vocals i use this one quite a bit when i'm making harmony vocals and they're basically they set kind of like the the template of how the time stretching affects the audio so i'll be giving you some examples as we go along but you might want to just you know again as i give you these things just to get your feet wet if you've never seen them you know click on an audio thing go up here to where it says algorithm and just explore these menus real quick just so that you see what's up here and you're not you know surprised by it now everything that i show you again there's probably five different ways and i'm going to be showing you more than one way to do everything that we do here but we're going to kind of go through it in order so the first basic way let's say we have this loop right now and as far as the click is going it's not exactly lined up now most of the time i find most loops i bring into cubase these days they are automatically lined up everything just works but in case you get a piece of audio like this or you've created it and it's not lining up [Music] the very first option to get it to work is again select it go up to the audio menu which is way at the top and scroll down until you see advanced once you see advanced you get a sub menu go over to where it says stretch to the project tempo and if you're lucky and you hit that it'll do just like this one did it'll stretch out and it'll fit into time and now it matches perfectly [Music] another option that works sometimes sometimes not i found but many times it works is when you click on an audio clip and you go back up into this toolbar next to these algorithms that we just talked about you're going to see an option that says musical mode and if you click on that and it changes to musical most the time it'll stretch the clip and put it in time and if musical mode is enacted this basically now is holding this you know tempo detection kind of data and if i change the tempo let me uh this is at 128 let me knock this down to 70. [Music] the loop will follow whatever temple i put in there as we go along we're going to be working also in the sample editor a bit so let's talk about that if i take this audio clip and i double click on it this is what's known as the sample editor it opens up with this big fancy thing up on top on the right you have some you know pain options in terms of what you want to view i would always recommend that you open up what's called this left zone over here if you don't see it in this left zone you're going to see there's an option right there for musical mode as well and you can check that just like you did on the info line and there's another one like i said there's so many ways to do the same thing up here on the info bar on this there's like a little note and this turns on this musical mode as well all right so let's talk about applying swing and what does that mean exactly uh you know swing is basically when you have a sound like well let's do these high hats here and they're real straight up and down tick tick tick tick tick okay well the difference when you add swing is it goes from tick tick tick tick tick to tick tick tick tick tick tick tick that's the swing effect all right and so let's do that let's bring this in i'm going to open up the hi-hats so what you can do is you want to go down to this audio warp tab and as we said before make sure this musical mode is on and the first thing you would look at is this these warping algorithms and i'm going to show you now where some of these make a difference but for now we'll just leave it right where it's at on the default but i'm going to show you how to hear and understand some of the differences but if you go up to this thing that says swing resolution right now it says a quarter note typically especially on high hats like this if you're going to apply swing you want to set it to an eighth note all right now watch what happens here's our basic kind of electronic sound and i'm going to start applying the swing and there's like a little lever up here as i turn it up and that's what i'm talking about let's go all the way up so you can really hear it [Music] and you can turn the swing on and off on the tab if you go to this audio or tab and you get the little button here now it's back to normal and now it's on before i leave this let's talk about these algorithms because you know there's so many of them and you tend to think oh you know what what difference do these make so let me show you what they what difference they do make i'm going to go down to the there's a two categories here this elastic and the standard i'm going to go to the standard and there's an option here this is standard drums so let's turn that on the good thing is is that you can audition these without having to go through making any changes so you actually can kind of you know go through them and hear the differences without having to do any kind of massive changes so let's listen to a different few of these and hear what they do so again it's on the drums right now let's switch it to this plucked one option some of them turn into almost like a double sound let's go to the pads option it kind of takes away the swing let's go to the vocals option you're getting kind of doubles on all the hits so they're all they all are designed you know for kind of like their specific thing that you're trying to affect so when you hit you know when you have sounds like drums you kind of want to use the one that says drums that one's designed to make a real quick hit let's go to the elastic ones let's go to format time no big difference there all right good let's go to formant tape oh tremendous difference so if you don't have the right uh algorithm selected you could have some pretty strange results happening at the same time you might want to try to experiment and get some strange results that's the fun of the whole thing let's try one more let's try the pitch it's got kind of a swish extra sound in there so there you go so be aware that those algorithms do make a difference you know and ultimately you'll kind of want to find one that's for the kind of sound that you're trying to affect so i'm going back to a midi part for a minute and i'm kind of knocking all these little hi-hats slightly off the grid because we're going to talk about what do you do if things don't line up in the first place so i'm just kind of moving them off the grid here so now i've got these hi-hats all over the place like this [Music] all right so now i've rendered that down to audio and it's still the hi-hats are still off-beat let's open it back up in the sample editor and now there's a button here that says auto-adjust let's go ahead and hit that and see what happens and what it did is it put in little red warp markers at particular beats it took its best shot at where it thinks the rhythm of this loop is let's actually do a couple of extra things here i'm going to set this grid resolution to an eighth note instead of a quarter note and now i'm going to hit this auto adjust button again and now it has put these grid resolution lines on every hi-hat and it's kind of figured out where the actual beat and this loop is and when it did that it pulled all of the audio of these high hats back onto the beat so now we have this they're not all over the place anymore now they're exactly on the beat so this allowed us to actually auto correct and put the audio on the beat there's a button here that says reset if we hit reset then all the little hi-hats go back to their kind of off the beat incorrect places and if i hit the auto adjust button again it automatically realigns them so that's what's called extracting a tempo definition grid it allows you to take basically incorrect audio and find out where it's supposed to be lined up and then it can create a grid which then can match the tempo so this like ottawa just works really good when you're dealing with things like these high hats you know where things are real defined um you know you can see where where it's supposed to hit and you're good to go but what if you get something that's you know a vocal and you know or some part that it's not the tempo isn't really necessarily clearly defined uh what do you do they put in an option to manually adjust it but there's some definitely some tricks let me show you the best i've been able to pull out of this so far so let's say we have a vocal like this i'm going to bring that into this project i'm going to play it with the drum beat that i have here [Music] so it's in there but it's definitely not uh you know tight and if the tempo changes it's not going to match anything so we've got this vocal that we need to align with our beat so what do we do well the first thing of course you gotta open it up and make sure you can see the pane over on the left and it automatically has a manual adjust that's what's up here and it'll stay that way unless you hit auto adjust but if i hit auto adjust it's going to come up with a terrible result it's not going to do us any good so the first thing we need to do in the manually adjust is figure out where is this vocal gonna start and i wanted to start right on this first b here so what you need to do is grab this very far left there's a starting point okay that's the first it's kind of like hidden against right against the left pane there if you don't see it you got to kind of grab it but you move that over wherever you think the vocal is going to start so i'm going to put it right there when i do that there's a little snap s down here in the middle that realigns itself to that so now this auto align first hit of the bar has been moved here and the snap moves over there as well now what we want to do at that point is shut this down again and take our vocal with that new little snap point that's been put in there and move that to the beginning so it's lined up and here's what we have now [Music] that's pretty good that's that's almost right on already we need to do some little fine adjustments but that's pretty good let's hear it one more time [Music] it lines up with the drum hits just not perfectly so let's do a little refining so i'm going to double click it again at that point after the start you would kind of click in this area and these little red lines will appear and these are the beats so you have to kind of align the beats where you think they go and i'm going to put them right at the beginning of each little vocal part here depending on whether i have this musical mode activated or not things will kind of snap around as i'm doing that if i turn that musical mode off i just move these beats around nothing you won't see anything audio change but the minute i kick this musical mode on things will align to the grid depending on where i put these red and start markers now let's hear what we've got [Music] right on the money now i can change my tempo let's uh let's speed it way up and everything should still work with the uh in alignment [Music] so there you go all right there you go as we launch off into this subject of tempo matching audio there's a lot to be covered but um it's definitely worth it it's good skill to get under your belt it will come up as always if you haven't grabbed your navigation guide be sure to grab that before you go links to all this content ever growing and quick and easy way to get to it without having to search through hundreds and hundreds of videos as always great to have everybody here and we'll see you in the next video