I’m very wary of trying to align all acoustic performances to hitpoints, because it can kill the flow of that stream.
Acoustic music has the opportunity to ‘breathe’, and each instrument does not have to align to each other, as they stop ‘dancing’ and just ‘march’. Music can be marching at ‘reinforcement’ points, and drifting away from each other at other times.
The trick is to adjust the minimum to make the performance sound like it was supposed to be that way.
We record all our tracks in timebase mode, with my wife setting the basic timing with her guitar and vocals. She is not playing, and definitely not singing, ‘on the bar’ of some rigid beat.
When we do extra tracks, we are playing to that basic track with no metronome, but playing to the feel, and so the timing can vary quite a lot, but sounds natural.
Now, I am not an accomplished musician and still suffering from performance anxiety, so while my lead has the feel, my fingers don’t always play at the time I want them to, so I have to fix up a few timings.
I wish Cubase had a simple means of defining two fixed points and varying a third to get the timing, like someone wrote that Reaper does.
However, not being one to have multiple DAWs, in the tracklist, I:
- Set resolution to 1ms.
- Set selector mode to timestretch.
- Turn off scrolling.
- Set looping on.
- Select the track to show it vertically expanded (or manually adjust its size).
- Set the locators to include a couple of bars before and after the problem area, so that when looping, I can hear the effect of any changes as I am doing them in sufficient musical context.
- Expand the display to cover only the notes of interest.
- Cut the track at the note before and after and at the note to be changed, trying to make the cut in an area of low signal (why explained later).
- Start playback.
- Adjust the note forward or back until it sounds ‘right’.
- Adjust the tail of the note before to join the head of the adjusted note. If it is ‘under’ the affected note’s segment, click just to the left of the lower start of the affected note and you will be adjusting previous note’s tail.
This can take some trial and error, and I sometimes do an exaggerated movement forward and back just to see what seems better, then adjust from there. - If nothing seems to works, you may have to adjust the note before or after instead, or even further. I just undo (ctrl-Z) to get back to before the cuts.
- If you get the right feel, bounce the track if you want to make sure you have captured the changes.
- Repeat steps 6 to 13 for each of any other changes.
- Bounce the track if you haven’t already done so.
These changes will produce an artefact right at the cut points, which can be seen in RX’s spectral view as a thin vertical line through all frequencies. Now, if you have chosen a low signal area, the line will probably not be audible, but to delete it in RX, I: - Select 1ms as the feathering cross-fade in the Miscellaneous Preferences.
- Select the Time-Frequency select mode.
- Expand the timebase until the artefact line is about 15-20mm (~1/2in) on the display.
- Click-and-drag a selection rectangle from the lowest frequency up to the top of the artefact (but definitely not right to the top, otherwise deleting below will cut out a complete vertical segment, rather than just reducing the levels), and about 1/2 a mm on each side of the ‘shaft’ of the artefact.
- Press the Delete key, which if the selection was done correctly, should produce a slight vertical black line, if you can see anything at all.
- Repeat steps 3 to 5 for each artefact.
- Save the file.
Note that I record and edit everything at 192ksps, so the audible processing artefacts from the stretching and RX are minimal.