changing tempo of drum loops
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Posted on May 15, 2003 05:54 pm
fortymile
Member Since: Jan 18, 2003
think i may need a bit of help with this...
i want to use some acid drum loops in this danzig cover song i'm doing right now in cubase sx (i'm doing it to learn the ins and outs of cubase and of mixing, without worrying about whether the song is any good or not). anyway, i have to take some loops that are at other tempos and bring them down (or up) to the tempo i need...about 121. i know vaguely that the process for this is that you have to get the program to count the beats in the loop and then calculate from that the BPM and then somehow tell it to raise or lower the BPM. unfortunately, i dont know how to do this.
i messed around with the beat calculator the other day. my experiment was to try to bring a drum track i did myself into sync with the drums in the danzig track. i couldnt get it to be exact. in fact it was quite off. either the song itself has a slowly ranging meter (drummers are only human) or else i didnt set the beat calculator exactly "right." probably, its a little bit of both. but if cubase's beat calculator is one of the tools you use to expand the tempo of a drum loop, then the other thing i need to know (which was unclear in the help files and book) is how to highlight the file so that it falls directly, exactly on the beat and therefore calculates accurately. in cool edit, there's a function, if i remember right, called 'find beats,' which i guess looks for transients or something. maybe i missed it here. maybe cubase has it. anyway...
sorry if i'm asking too many questions here that i should be able to figure out myself. by coming to you guys before tinkering, i guess i'm trying to save myself the frustration of failure. if youre impatient like i can be, too many screw ups can turn you off to digital audio altogether or make you conclude wrongly that your software is too hard to use and you should go back to your simple 8-track. i think i'm looking for a certain critical mass of understanding, beyond which i'll start to be more comfortable with all of this. plus i just much prefer interacting here than with a book and it seems like you guys like to answer.
thanks!
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MinkusMazBane of All ExistenceMember
Since: Mar 27, 2003
May 15, 2003 07:20 pm you totally don't need your calculator if you have acid. all you need to do is:
(1) make sure that the loop is cropped to the point where if you repeat it over and over again, it doesn't skip a beat.
(2) find out how many quarter notes the loop is, or skip to the next step if you're clueless on that.
(3) pop the loop into acid, and edit the properties of the file. you'll get a chance to make it one-shot, loop, disk-based, etc. set it to loop, and play with the number of beats box until it sounds right during playback.
(4) adjust tempo slider to the tempo you want.
May 15, 2003 09:47 pm haha
thanks but i dont have acid.
i got an acid loops cd as a christmas present last year from my sister. i've never used them. (i wanted some drum loops, to simplify drum tracking, and i knew acid made them and i thought they could be used cross-platform and that, in the absence of knowledge about any other loop manufacterers, acid would be an ok place to start).
i dont want to use acid, either. :) gotta use 'em in cubase!
May 16, 2003 01:44 pm so has anyone ever done this in cubase?
May 16, 2003 01:45 pm Well, for other loops makers, you can never go wrong with PowerFX.
Sorry, though can't help you beyond that.
May 16, 2003 03:28 pm i don't use Cubase, but i've used WaveLab to carefully time/pitch stretch loops to fit into a specific tempo for FruityLoops. It's usually trial and error and takes several attempts to get an exceptable flow, but I'm sure there's easier ways. It's possible, I just don't know how you'd do it in Cubase. What wave editor are you using?
May 16, 2003 05:22 pm the only thing i could use for wave editing right now is cool edit pro. i hadnt thought to work on the loop in cep and then port it over to cubase. that might be easier. i think cep has a 'find beats' feature.
thanks for the suggestions. i'll get on it.
