Acoustica User Forums

I not new to recording, but AM new to Mixcraft. I am excited to report that Mixcraft has renewed my interest for working in a DAW. After almost 2 weeks with the Pro 7 demo, a full version copy should be arriving today so that I can finish some mixes.

My question...

I am interested in trying out the audio warp feature to see if I can dial in some live drum parts. Has anyone used this feature in the same manner as Pro-Tools' "beat detective?" If so, did you apply it to the individual drum tracks or a drum group? How did it work out for you?

I look forward to hearing your input!

Best,
Mark

Hi,

Give it a try on an individual drum track. Check out page 78 of the help manual for info on Warp, AutoWarp and Quantize.

Greg

Attached is a fun little example of how Warping is really useful in a studio context with percussion.

I recorded myself playing a shaker along with a beat for around 30 measures. Then I cut out one single measure of the shaker recording near the end, when my timing was sloppy. My shaker playing wasn’t perfectly in time with the beat, as is to be expected, so I used Mixcraft 7’s warping capabilities to make small corrections to the recording so my shaker playing would be perfectly in time. The end result is perfectly timed shaker playing that loops perfectly. I simply snapped the shaker audio to the beat, and the end result is that the recording is sped up or slowed down slightly so that the shaker hits occur on the beat.

Listen to the attached file. The first two measures are a loop of warped shaker, playing perfectly. The second two measures are the original shaker recording. You’ll quickly hear how out-of-time and sloppy it is.

Hope that helps a little!

Dan

Hi I'm new to this forum. I Just bought Mixcraft 7 Pro and have the same question.

If you slide one track and not the others (say a drum track has a kick, snare, and 2 overheads) then you run a risk of introducing track phasing artifacts. Is there any way of placing an audio warp marker at the same exact place on all 4 tracks so that they can all move by exactly the same amount (to snap one of the 4 tracks "hits" to a defined measures beat on the grid) All of the other tracks should be adjusted at the same place and by the same amount to stay in phase.

Hi,

There's no option to warp multiple clips in unison. You have to do it one clip at a time. Have you tried it? Have you detected any phasing problems?

One work around would be to solo those tracks, mix them down to a wav file, and then warp that wav file.

Greg

Thanks for the quick reply. Yes, phasing issues do creep in if you don't adjust all of the tracks by the same amount. Especially when you have 8 or 12 mics on a drum kit. Ok, thanks for the heads up on only being to work with one track at a time using warp. It works great for single mic/track tightening. I'll look for a feature request thread and pop it into there and also add another nod for the "fader grouping" requests.

Hi,

Thanks for the feature suggestion!

Greg

Thanks for the replies! The songs that I am working on right now are fairly simple, with 2 overheads and a kick mic. I can verify that it worked very well when I experimented with the kick mic alone. I will attempt to audio warp bass guitar and kick to tighten up the low end a bit. The playing is already pretty tight, and mostly right on timing-wise. I did attempt it on an overhead track, and detected some artifacting in the cymbals.

My boxed copy of Pro 7 just came in the mail, so once I get that installed, I will experiment and report back the results (possibly with audio files) to see what it sounds like using a drum mixdown vs. individual tracks. I do like the way that audio warping is thought-out in the software. It's more straight-forward than the "beat detective" stuff in Pro-tools. I agree with bandso that a multiple-track selection feature would be very helpful for these purposes.

Dan: Audio warp worked great to tighten up that shaker!

Best,
Mark