Have you ever wondered what the song you recorded would sound like if you could only change the tempo? Ever thought it would be convenient to tighten up performances without having to tediously edit every single note?
In this video, Ben Lindell shows you how you can use Elastic Audio to make changes ranging from subtle to extreme.
You’ll learn:
The various types of Elastic Audio algorithms and what they are best suited for
The difference between time and tick based tracks
How to change an audio region from being sample based to tick based
How to avoid audible phase issues that result from multi-mic’d instruments
Essential keyboard shortcuts that speed up your workflow
Tips and tricks for using Warp Markers
How to conserve the original groove of the song while tightening up key elements of the performance
00:00:10 Today, I'm gonna be showing you
how to use Elastic Audio.
00:00:12 There's a couple of main uses
for Elastic Audio.
00:00:15 The first one I'm gonna show you is
how to change the tempo of a whole song
and have your audio tracks automatically
spanned or compressed to match the grid.
00:00:23 The second use I'm gonna show you
is how to tighten up performances
between members of the band.
So let's get started!
Here's my session. As you can see,
I have some drums,
percussion, bass,
and acoustic guitar.
00:00:35 Everything was recorded to the click
at 154 bpm.
00:00:38 Let's take a listen
to see how it sounds.
00:00:53 Ok! So that sounds great.
00:00:55 But let's say the producer wants to see
what this song sounds like 4 bpm slower.
00:00:59 How am I gonna do that?
I'm gonna enable Elastic Audio
on all my tracks
and then change the tempo.
So let's do that!
So for my drums...
00:01:10 I select my drum tracks,
and even the percussion,
and I'm gonna select Elastic Audio.
But wait!
There's four different algorithms here.
What do these mean?
Well Polyphonic works best on polyphonic
material, like guitars, keyboards,
anything that has more than one note
happening at the same time.
00:01:28 Rhythmic works best on
drums and percussion,
and Monophonic, which works best on
instruments that are only playing
one note at a time,
such as bass, or vocals.
00:01:37 The last one is Varispeed,
which not only changes the timing,
but also changes the pitch,
just like a tape machine would.
00:01:43 If you speed it up,
the pitch will go up,
if you slow it down,
the pitch will also go down.
00:01:47 The next step is where most people
get hung up.
00:01:49 In Pro Tools, tracks can be
either sample-based,
or tick-based.
00:01:53 Sample-based tracks mean that
all the regions and information
are tied to the minutes and seconds
of the session.
00:01:59 Tick-based means that
all the regions and information
are tied to the bars and beats.
00:02:03 Since I want to change
the tempo of my audio tracks,
I'm gonna need to change them
from being sample-based
to being tick-based.
So let's do that!
By default, Pro Tools makes
all audio tracks sample-based,
and makes all MIDI
and instrument tracks tick-based.
00:02:17 To change all my tracks to being
tick-based,
I'm gonna press Option, and click on
this blue dot down here...
00:02:24 and select Ticks.
00:02:26 That converts all my tracks
to being tick-based.
00:02:30 Let's see how this song sounds
slowed down 4 bpm.
00:02:33 To do so, I'm just gonna come up here
and change my tempo to 150 bpm.
00:02:38 Let's take a listen!
Elastic Audio can also be used
to do extreme changes.
00:02:57 Let's see
what this song sounds like at 180 bpm.
00:03:13 Alright! It sounds the same,
just much faster.
00:03:16 It totally changes
the vibe of the track.
00:03:18 As you can see,
Elastic Audio can be used
to make both subtle and extreme
tempo changes,
all while still sounding pretty good.
00:03:25 But a word of warning, when you're
using it with multi-miked instruments
such as drums, whenever there's bleed
from one microphone to another,
and you use Elastic Audio on them,
you can create some phase issues,
which sometimes can become
very audible.
00:03:37 Now, let's move on
and tighten up some performances.
00:03:41 Since this song was played
by humans and not computers,
the timing isn't 100% perfect,
which is fine,
because that gives it its groove,
but I want to see if there's any timing
areas that need to get corrected.
00:03:52 Let's listen to the guitar and drums
and see how they lock together.
00:04:04 That's on most of the time.
00:04:06 But you can hear every once in a while
the guitar pushes a little too much.
00:04:09 To start with, I'm gonna move my acoustic
guitar up into the middle of my drums,
so I can easily see
how they line up together.
00:04:16 Let's zoom in and take a look at this.
00:04:20 As you can see, the level
of the acoustic guitar
is a little bit lower
than the kick drum.
00:04:24 I'm gonna zoom in on the waveform
by pressing Option+Cmd+Bracket...
00:04:29 Ok! As you see, right here...
00:04:32 my acoustic guitar is
just a little ahead of my kick drum.
00:04:35 Let's scroll along
and take a look at this.
00:04:37 I can see the same thing right here.
00:04:40 Right here, it looks like
they're pretty well together...
00:04:44 A little more together.
Right here, they're a little bit off.
00:04:47 That's probably one of the obvious ones
that we heard while listening back.
00:04:51 Ok, so there's a little bit of timing
to be done here, but not a lot.
00:04:55 So now I'm gonna change my Track View
from Waveform to Warp markers.
00:05:00 To do that, I can come over here,
and click on "waveform,"
and select "warp."
Or, since you know
how much I love keyboard shortcuts,
I'm just gonna press
Ctrl+Cmd+Left arrow.
00:05:11 That brings me to my Warp View.
00:05:14 How do we add a Warp marker?
There are two ways to add
a Warp marker to a track.
00:05:18 The most common way is to double-click
on these dark grey analysis lines
which are aligned with the transients,
which is generally
what we want to be moving around.
00:05:27 The other way to add a Warp marker
is to press Ctrl...
00:05:30 and click anywhere on the track,
and it'll drop a Warp marker.
00:05:34 If you're not happy with
where a Warp marker is placed,
you can easily remove it by pressing
Option and clicking the Warp marker.
00:05:41 The way that I like to tighten up
performances
is actually by doing
as little work as possible.
00:05:46 And by that, I mean
just moving around the main hits,
generally the downbeats and backbeats.
00:05:50 Make sure the guitar and drums are
locked together
whenever there's a kick or a snare.
00:05:54 By leaving
everything in between untouched,
I maintain a lot of my groove
and feel that the player played.
00:06:00 Let me show you what happens when
you move around a single Warp marker.
00:06:03 Pro Tools is actually gonna slide
the entire region along with it,
because it doesn't have any other
points of reference as far as warps go.
00:06:10 To fix this, I'm gonna add a Warp marker
before this part I want to move,
and one after.
00:06:17 Now when I move my Warp marker,
nothing else moves except for the one
I want to move around.
00:06:24 Now, since I've locked down
these other two points of reference,
when I move the one in the middle,
the rest of my region doesn't change,
just the areas surrounding
this transient.
00:06:32 Let's move on
and add some more Warp markers,
and start
tightening this performance up.
00:06:43 As you can see,
I'm adding a Warp marker
to the spot after a part
that I want to move,
and then going back
and moving the part that's off.
00:06:51 Here we go! Same thing,
I want to move this transient.
00:06:55 Here I want one marker
behind where I want to move.
00:06:59 And then, drag this into place.
00:07:04 Here's another example.
00:07:11 Let's see and move this one
just a little bit. Ok!
Let's double check our work
and take a listen.
00:07:27 As you can hear, our drums and guitar
are definitely getting a lot tighter.
00:07:31 Now you saw how I was doing it,
I'm just adding a Warp marker
here and there wherever I see
something that's off.
00:07:36 But the important part is to go back
and listen to your work
because sometimes, something may
look like it's on, but still sound off.
00:07:42 So moving forward, I'm gonna
show you a couple of tricks
to speed up the process
of adding Warp markers.
00:07:48 I've placed my Shaker track
in between my kick and snare
so I can start tightening it up.
00:07:52 Let's zoom in
and switch to Warp View.
00:07:56 The first trick that I have
is while adding a Warp marker,
if you press Shift,
Pro Tools will automatically add
Warp markers on either side of it,
looking at the analysis points.
00:08:07 Then I can easily move
the one in the middle.
00:08:10 The other trick is when I know
I'm gonna have to do a lot of warping,
I select the whole region,
and bring up my Quantize window
by pressing Option+0.
00:08:19 If I were to just press Apply right now,
Pro Tools would quantize
every analysis marker to the grid,
being 1/16 note, 1/8 note, etc.
00:08:28 But I don't want that, because
my drums aren't perfectly to the grid.
00:08:31 But I do want a Warp marker everywhere
that there's an analysis marker.
00:08:35 So how do I do that?
I'm gonna come down to Options
and I'm gonna set my Strength to 1%.
00:08:41 This will add a Warp marker
everywhere there's an analysis marker
but it won't move them at all, and
I'll be able to adjust them all manually.
00:08:49 Let me close my Quantize window.
00:08:52 Now once again, to preserve the groove,
I'm actually gonna go through
and be deleting
markers that I don't want,
and moving the markers
that I want to tighten.
00:09:00 I'm gonna delete all these in-between
markers, otherwise known as groove,
and move my strong beat.
00:09:07 I delete all these markers...
00:09:10 and move my strong beat.
00:09:16 As you can see,
this actually is a lot quicker
than going through and double-clicking
and adding markers before and after...
00:09:26 Just like that.
00:09:28 Let's zoom out and take a listen to
these first couple of bars.
00:09:38 You can hear that the shaker is now
perfectly locked to the kick drum.
00:09:41 But in between,
there's still some push and pull.
00:09:43 Now in some spots it sounds good,
in other spots, I'd probably
want to go back in there and fix it up.
00:09:48 Once you're happy with
how your Elastic Audio sounds,
it's actually a good idea
to go ahead and render it.
00:09:53 What this does is it saves your computer
from having to think about it
in real time every time you press Play.
00:09:58 To do so, click on where you selected
your Elastic Audio algorithm
and select Rendered Processing.
00:10:05 Pro Tools will think for a second,
and now your Elastic Audio is no longer
being processed in real time,
saving you some CPU power.
00:10:12 Once I'm done, I personally like
to take it one step farther
and commit my Elastic Audio.
00:10:17 To do that, I'm gonna come over
to where I selected my algorithm
and select
None - Disable Elastic Audio.
00:10:24 Doing so brings up a dialog box
that says Revert, Cancel or Commit.
00:10:29 If I press Revert, Pro Tools will remove
all my Warp markers
and return the region to
how it was before I started.
00:10:36 If you press Commit, Pro Tools will
actually render a new audio file,
turn off Elastic Audio, and make
your editing permanent.
00:10:43 Today I showed you a couple of
great uses for Elastic Audio.
00:10:46 Whether you want to change
the tempo for your entire song,
or you just want to tighten up
individual performances
and create a more cohesive sound,
Elastic Audio is
a pretty versatile tool.
00:10:55 So, till next time!
Once logged in, you will be able to read all the transcripts jump around in the video.
Ben is a NYC based producer/engineer who has worked with artists from MGMT to Soulja Boy, Bebel Giberto to Lloyd Banks, Ryan Leslie, Olivia, Tony Yayo, Red Cafe, Edie Brickell, Carole Pope and hundreds of other artists from around the world. He grew up in Iowa and then attended the University of Miami.
In addition to being a fantastic musician he is also a tremendous geek when it comes to anything technical, be it software, plug-ins, microphones or outboard gear. It's this marriage of musical creativity and technical know-how that makes him an in demand producer/engineer.
This is a great video that explains it very simply and concisely. The ONLY thing I would change is that it's incredibly quiet. I had to crank my interface to make it loud enough to hear
info@islandrecordingstudios.com
2016 Dec 13
Thanks Ben. Just one quick question - when would you personally change the elastic audio algorithm to xform? I normally do this once I'm happy with it the editing and before I commit the audio. I find it generally helps the sound. Thanks heaps!
wilian
2016 Aug 18
Tio pelo amor de me: voce faz um beat de grassa pra min!tenho uma musica de rap dificil de acha a base
Pearlpassionstudio
2014 Jul 27
Thanks Ben for this...explained very, very well. Your the best. Fab too!
vlakanas
2014 Jul 07
Very good! I have used it many times. But the vid gives you some extra tid bits that makes my life easier.
Thanks
kimnitram
2014 Jun 30
Thank you,that really helps !
Alex Mirniy
2014 Jun 26
Thnks!!!Good
sound11advice
2014 Jun 17
Collecting the groove from one audio file using Beat Detective then quantizing another track using Elastic Audio and the Groove Clip Board. Hope that makes sense : )
sound11advice
2014 Jun 17
Will the PureMix team be making another video on Elastic Audio that shows how to quantize an audio track using Beat Detective's groove clipboard function? Perhaps you already have in another video?
