Changing the tempo of an entire song?

[GC65]

Hello,

I am interested in changing the tempo of an entire song. I will provide hopefully a good example of what I am trying to accomplish.

- I recorded a song that is 5 minutes long.
- Track one is using a plugin that provides midi drums.
- The drum track comprises of many drum measures and beats, most are individual "slices" due to fills and drums changes
- On two other tracks I have non contiguous audio input guitar tracks. They are broken up periodically due to changes, mistakes, punch ins etc.
- The entire song is recorded at 100 bpm

Is there a way for me to "quantize" (is that the correct term?) the entire song and choose say 90bpm or 110bpm, or whatever bpm. I am not satisfied that 100bpm is the correct speed and don't want to record the guitar tracks all over again.

I think I may have to export the entire song so that it is one track, then change the time? I'm just not certain what to do here.

Thanks in advance to whomever helps.

[Peter Widdicombe]

At a basic level, you should first get a good idea of what speed you really want it all to be. Please note I haven't a lot of experience in doing this and there may be simpler ways...

I would first export the song as is, to .mp3 or whatever.
Open a NEW project and import that .mp3 into the first track. Then try using the "elastique pro" option and change the tempo of the clip, to find out what tempo you'd really like. Default, it will keep pitch and do an amazing job of preserving quality of the song - drums, and your audio tracks will have all become one audio to manipulate.

Once it sounds "good", note the final length of the song and the time compression you used; and try to determine the new tempo. You MAY actually be satisfied with this version. It's possible you could get the drums and other MIDI tracks sounding better.

Here's where they are probably other methods, but... Go back to the original song, and apply that tempo to the song (which would affect the drum track and any other MIDI that might be present). Select the clips, and apply the same time compression with elastique to them. Note that if you have multiple clips in each track, you should first render them to a single clip within the track.

You may have to play with offsets and exact tempo to get both to align front to back.

[GC65]

Thank you for the quick reply and I will give both ideas a try. I usually get to this point when the song has all or most parts and I finally got a solid workable outline, then I notice it might be slightly too fast/slow so my change in tempo would be within +/- 10 bpm.

Your suggested methods should solve the problem or at least get me in the ballpark. Much appreciated!

[GC65]

I am a bit lost finding where Elastique Pro is? Is this a VST I need to download?

[Peter Widdicombe]

It's built in. Select the clip you want to stretch. On the bottom center section, there is a stretch algorithm, probably defaults to No Stretch, and you can select the kind of stretch you want; then underneath how MUCH to stretch.

I believe it actually preserves the original audio clip, as it you select another value and then return to "original" it's instantaneous.

[GC65]

Morning Peter,

Happy thanksgiving to you if you celebrate that...

That worked! I found the time stretch at the bottom as you stated, changed stretch to Eastique Pro, changed from 1.0 to 1.15 and that pretty much got the speed I am looking for. Prior I just exported the entire song as you and I thought then did this technique, worked perfectly!

This method seems to be the best way to do this at a minimum for testing as I can't really play accurately at the speed I want (hear).

I really appreciate your help with this!