
As you can see, they are not all in time, and so they sound messy.

Screen 1 (above) shows a stack of three harmony takes of the same vocal part. In this month’s workshop, we’re going to look at the third technique Pro Tools offers: Warp Audio. With a little work and the X–Form Elastic Audio algorithm, I was able to get an even better–sounding result.

In the January 2010 Pro Tools workshop I revisited my problem piano, this time using Elastic Audio to quantise the piano part rather than cutting it up with Beat Detective as I had done before. Introduced in Pro Tools 7.4 back in 2008, Elastic Audio offers an alternative way to modify the timing of recorded audio, this time using one of a variety of high–quality time–stretching algorithms. Once I’d created a correct tempo map, the technique worked surprisingly well. However, it isn’t just for drums, as I demonstrated back in the December 2005 Pro Tools workshop, where I used Beat Detective to fit a piano part to an existing track. As the name implies, this tends to work best with drums and percussion, where you are aiming to get the start bang on the beat and the duration of the sound is unlikely to need modifying. One of the most well–known editing tools in Pro Tools is Beat Detective, which in essence automates the process of chopping up an audio file at transients or ‘hit points’ and moving each little chunk into time. All have their places, and depending on your circumstances, there are times when each of them will be the best.

There are three basic techniques that you can employ in Pro Tools. One issue that crops up time and again in the editing phase is the need to correct the timing of recorded audio. Many of the features within Pro Tools were developed to solve perennial problems that arise during recording, editing or mixing. Screen 1: These layered vocal parts are clearly out of time.įor the most effective time correction in Pro Tools, you need to choose your weapon carefully.
