EQ Magazine - June 2008 - (Page 38)

MIX BUS MATCHING OUT-OF-SYNC ANALOG TAPE WITH DAWS You Can Use Tape with Digital . . . But It Has to Line Up by Jonathan Stars Years ago I was recording in a studio with a 16-track, 1" tape machine. I owned an 8track, 1/4" machine. So I had the studio make me a stereo mix that I could play on my recorder, allowing me to work on the vocals in my studio until I got what I needed. After multiple playbacks and a few years, the stereo mix had deteriorated; fortunately, the vocals still sounded fresh. I rented a 1" machine and transferred the audio tracks into Pro Tools, where I planned to import my vocal tracks. I matched the waveform of the first vocal note to the downbeat of the verse. It sounded perfect—and then it began to drift. The tape with the vocals had stretched and, by the end of the song, it was off from the multitrack by a full beat! The method shown here to resynchronize tracks from different tape recorders works equally well for one or more tracks of any kind. The main requirement is that you have at least one track from each recorder that shares musical material and plays virtually from beginning to end. You can use the same method if you have a timecode reference, though you may find spotting the matching frequency waveforms difficult. If the sync problems are due to major differences in machine speeds, you may also have to use pitch correction. THE ANSWER I first used Pitch ’n Time (see sidebar) to shorten the vocal, forcing the beginning of my last note to match the backing track. This didn’t work, as the 1/4" tape had stretched by different amounts in various places. I needed to break the vocals into sections, and perform multiple time compressions and/or expansions. You may think it easy to just clip the vocal into smaller sections, and fix it piece by piece. But a vocalist’s job is to be expressive, and that doesn’t mean being overly accurate with regard to time. It helps to have a more rhythmic reference, like the stereo mix of the backing tracks. BRING IN THE AUDIO I imported the vocal and one of the backing tracks together. Both regions had the same start and end points. I grouped them so that moving either track would move the other. This avoided another sync problem. To find the right starting place for my vocal, I used the backing track, lining up the start note with the piano’s start note from the original 1" master multitrack. Switching to Shuffle mode, I zoomed in and then moved the grouped tracks manually with the Grabber tool, set the Ruler to Samples, and set the Nudge to 10 samples, clicking the key until the samples matched up. The start of the vocal lined up where expected. I played through the song, listening for a disagreement between the parts and looking for a place where the vocal dropped out so I could make fixes where the vocal was absent. I found such a place at the end of the first chorus. I clicked on the transient on the piano part and dragged down across the backing track to the matching transient there. (You may try the Audio Zoom In tool to make the audio waveform taller; this is circled in Figure 2. Or, with recent versions of Pro Tools, grab a track’s Fig. 1: Selected waveforms and selection length. Fig. 2: The TCE and Audio Zoom tools. TIME TO STRETCH Not unexpectedly, I found that Pro Tools’ TC/E (Time Compression/ Expansion) algorithms gave unwanted audio artifacts when changing the audio’s length by any appreciable amount. Serato’s Pitch ’n Time (PNT) plug-in for Pro Tools has been the professional standard for some years; while at $799 list it’s not cheap, it can transpose well over a wider range than most timestretch algorithms (Serato now has an LE version for $399, but I haven’t tried it). Download a free PNT demo at www.serato.com/ products/pnt/. lower boundary in the Edit view’s left-hand column, and drag up or down to resize.) I clicked the Enter key to bring up the Memory Location dialog, created a Marker titled “Drift 1,” and logged the selection edit length (Figure 1). You’ll need this number in case you can’t find a silence in your “keeper” track. A few times, I also needed to move my marker and find a different spot, so write that number down. SLICING AND SQUEEZING Switching to the Selector tool, I clicked at the right boundary of the selection on the two grouped tracks, zooming in to find a “zero crossing” just before the backing track note started. Find the zero crossing in the keeper track, as choosing a zero crossing helps to avoid creating a click in your edited 38 EQ JUNE 2008 www.eqmag.com http://www.serato.com/products/pnt http://www.serato.com/products/pnt http://www.eqmag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of EQ Magazine - June 2008

EQ Magazine - June 2008 Contents Talk Box Sounding Board 3 Doors Down, Hard-Fi, Paul Manousos Tool Box Panic at the Disco Guitar Trax Bass Management Key Issues Drum Heads Vocal Cords Mix Bus Cheat Sheet Cakewalk Projects Apple Loops Utility SSL Duende Mini JBL LSR4326/PAK & LSR4312SP Holophone H3-D Creation Audio Labs MW1 Studio Tool Amp Modeler Roundup Eventide Timefactor, Electro-Harmonix Stereo Pedals, Korg Pandora PX5D Room with a Vu: Blues Tunes Studios, Silverlake, CA

EQ Magazine - June 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.