Pardon the delay. Been busy working, but I wanted to chime in to say that the Range Tool was exactly what I was missing. Again, thanks for the suggestion Audiocave, and also to ggc for taking the time to help me.
For anyone interested, here’s the easiest way to adjust the delay of your multi-miced tracks:
- After recording your tracks, set the project ruler to Samples (setting it to Seconds won’t give you accurate results).
- Zoom In as far as possible and then use the Range Tool to select the area needed to calculate the gap between the mics. The Info Line will give you the exact Range Length (you’ll need to enable the Info Line, if you haven’t already, in order to see this info).
- Take that number and divide it by the Sample Rate of your project. This will convert Samples to Milliseconds.
- Now input the result into the Delay box found in the Track Inspector of the corresponding track (in this case, the miced cabinet track). Et voila!
You could argue that it is much faster to simply move the miced track the necessary amount without having to perform all of these steps. However, as mentioned before, this is not very convenient when you have multiple takes and/or track versions in your project. By taking the time to calculate this delay however, you can enter this number once and everything recorded will be automatically time adjusted. As ggc said, the same offset would apply to ALL similar situations (i.e. Your Bass tracks across different songs in an album) as long as the mic distance is kept the same.
Keep in mind that this procedure is NOT recommended on stereo recordings, where you do want the time differences between the mics to be kept the way they were recorded. It would mess up the stereo effect if you time adjusted them. However, if you had a direct signal as well as a stereo pair of mics for the same source, then you do want to time align the stereo mics to the direct signal the way described in this post. You just need to make sure you treat the stereo mics as one element, and move them together as one.
Well, I hope this helps someone out there who may have the same question.
Take care!