User Manual

CHAPTER
737
62 Adjust Beats
OVERVIEW
Adjust Beats (Project menu>Conductor
Track>Adjust Beats) lets you align Digital
Performer’s time ruler to music (either MIDI or
audio) in cases where the Beat Detection Engine
and tempo analysis features are not suited for the
material. For example, you might be importing a
full mix of a rubato performance for which the Beat
Detection Engine cannot accurately detect beats
and tempo.
The problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 737
Using Adjust Beats. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 737
THE PROBLEM
Adjust Beats addresses the following problem:
you’ve just imported an audio file into Digital
Performer — or you recorded it without listening
to Digital Performer’s metronome — and the audio
is completely out of sync with the sequence’s
tempo, beats and barlines. In addition, it cannot be
accurately processed by the Beat Detection Engine
or tempo analysis features because of the nature of
the material.
How do you get Digital Performer’s measures and
beats to line up with the audio?
USING ADJUST BEATS
The audio used in this example (Figure 62-1) is a
simplified example for the purposes of
demonstrating the Adjust Beats command. Note,
however, that audio of this nature (monophonic
audio with clearly defined transients) can be quite
successfully analyzed with the Beat Detection
Engine and should be aligned to the sequence
tempo using beats and tempo analysis.
To use the Adjust Beats command to get Digital
Performer’s beats and barlines to line up with
audio:
1 Place the soundbite in a track.
Figure 62-1: A rubato soundbite imported into a new sequence in
Digital Performer. Notice that the measures and beats don’t line up
with the beat spikes in the audio waveform because their tempos do
not match. (The sequence currently has a constant tempo; the
soundbite has a changing tempo.)
2 Choose Project menu>Conductor Track>Adjust
Beats.
3 Turn on Adjust Beats (check the box).
4 Adjust beats lets you adjust entire measures or
specific beats. In this example, we’ll start adjusting
the first measure and then fine-tune the beats, so
for now, the Adjust menu is set to measures, and
we’ll set the other options as shown below for now.