[Tip of the day] Tempo map from rotten audio file

I’m a little impressed what Cubase can do today! :sunglasses:

I have this old cassette-recording I wanted to “snatch” the guitar solo from, because it’s worth a better fate.
It’s just me and a friend but I had this plan for ages to rerecord the silly song and the solo has to be note for note perfect so … haha! I brought it onto myself :mrgreen:
I want to do it as exact as possible so I need to practice a little and I needed to loop a section at a time.
I thought I just use the tempo detection thingie but alas the tape was just a mess!!!
All bass and thunder synth pads and heavy guitars and almost no drums … very old tape … VERY OLD!
what to do?
I have tried this before but this seemed to be to far gone but it’s worth a try.
What I did was I had the original audio track and then I duplicated it and muted the original.
Then I proceeded to heavily EQ the copy track to get rid all the noises that distracted Cubase while detecting the tempo.
I ended up with a “curve from hell” with two sharp peeks, on around 100hz and the other at 5kHz.
The rest of the curve was lying flat at the bottom almost of the window and the sound was HORRID!!!
*pf tz pf tz pf tz pf tz pf tz pf tz * but that’s what I was after.
Then I used the tempo detection tool and … voilà!!! IT WORKED! :sunglasses: :laughing:

I unmuted the original track and muted the EQed copy and now I have a workable tempotrack.
I can loop any bar and practice all I want until I have it down exactly as I want it.
Mission accomplished!

great tip sir , love it !

+1
and a major Mahalo!
{‘-’}

I take it the track is NOT prog rock with time-signature changes every other measure? :wink:

Cool trick, thanks for sharing! :sunglasses:

That’s funny because everything else about the song is kinda proggy except the s l o w 55bpm tempo and the 4/4 time. It’s a backdrop to my friends dreamy poem so it had to conform to the context. Most other songs of that era had at least some sections with odd time signatures and tempo changes, but not that one haha! :laughing: