Changing project tempo after using varispeed

[Stubai]

Hi there,

I demoed a song at 88bpm. It seemed a bit lacking in energy, so I experimented with changing the tempo using varispeed. The new speed is 92bpm, which I'm happy with. When I recorded some new guitar parts at 92bpm, they sounded "warbly" and odd.

So now I've figured out what the right tempo is (92bpm) I figure I should set up the project properly at 92 bpm, without the varispeed.

My question is: what is best practice for doing this? I tried changing the master project tempo setting to 92bpm, using but ADAPT and KEEP tempo, but the different tracks (some are audio, some are MIDI) sounded out of whack.

I find I often need to adjust the tempos of my demos, so it would be great to be able to do this efficiently and quickly.

Thanks in advance for your help,

Matt

 

[scg]

It sounds like flex time should cover this. If you have flex on and have appropriate track flex modes set, and if your audio regions have appropriate tempo information (which they should if they were recorded in the project itself), you should be able to change the actual tempo of the project (not using varispeed) and have everything adjust accordingly. Anything you record after such an adjustment will just be played at the tempo at which it was recorded, so there shouldn't be any warbling or other artifacts. (Flex is pretty good to begin with, so even if the tempo is changed you'll still likely be able to avoid noticeable artifacts.)

If you don't have everything set up right, changing tempos can be a little messy sometimes (e.g. you might get to one section and all of a sudden one audio file isn't playing in time). But, if everything's set up right, you should be able to change tempo easily.

[Stubai]

Hi scg,

thanks for your reply. Can I ask what are the appropriate flex mode settings? Is this something I would need to set up for every project, in case I start playing with the varispeed?

Cheers!

[scg]

31 minutes ago, Stubai said:

Hi scg,

thanks for your reply. Can I ask what are the appropriate flex mode settings? Is this something I would need to set up for every project, in case I start playing with the varispeed?

Cheers!

I don't use varispeed much, and I don't want to give you any wrong information about it. As far as I know though, it works independently of flex time. That is, flex time and varispeed are two separate features, and you don't have to do anything in particular with flex time in order to use varispeed.

That said, flex time should give you higher quality results in general than varispeed, and is what you'd want to use if you were to change the tempo 'for real', so I'd suggest using flex instead of varispeed unless you have a particular reason for using the latter (which you may - it has some particular features of its own, and may be useful in certain circumstances). For my own part, I experiment with tempo a lot, and have only ever used flex for that.

The documentation is useful, but might be a bit overwhelming at first glance. I probably can't summarize all the relevant info here, but in general, if you recorded audio in the same project, and if you have flex on for the track and also for a given region, that region should follow tempo changes. You can also select from various flex modes and set various parameters for those modes. This is all detailed in the documentation, but there are some obvious choices available (e.g. 'monophonic' for vocals or a typical bass guitar track).

If you're using flex but have an audio region that's playing out of time, the first thing to check is that flex is enabled for the track, and also for the region itself. Anyway, if you run into any specific problems, just ask and someone should be able to help 🙂

[Stubai]

Hi scg,

thanks again for your detailed reply. I applied flextime to the audio tracks, and this indeed seems to have fixed the issue. The guitar tracks still sound warbly and wobbly, but they were only scratch tracks so I can rerecord them, no problems.

Many thanks

Matt