Synching New Tracks To Old Recordings With Cakewalk Sonar AudioSnap

AudioSnap is a great thing, if it works. I tried it many times in the past and never got the results I wanted.

All I can say is that a light came on the other day. It reminded me once again that all this technology can get in the way of remembering that "simpler is better."

I had almost written AudioSnap off as a tool for those who have audio tracks with heavy percussion defining each beat.

I think I mentioned in another post that creating backtracks for my brother (a singer) got me interested in sequencing. Any recordings that couldn't be "vocal removed" gave me another project to help me learn how to create sequences.

With all the karaoke tracks out there, there are still songs my brother likes to sing, and there are no tracks available for them. Or, the karaoke is in an impossible key for certain vocal ranges. 

He sent an original recording of such a song.

Before I go any further, what you read below will be foreign to you if you haven't at least played around with AudioSnap. You can take any recording and practice doing what I'm suggesting here. I would suggest a recording that starts on beat one of measure one. Something with a relatively steady beat. And maybe something fairly short.

I dragged the original recording my brother sent into an audio track in Sonar. The tempo was about 142, but it ranged from about 140 to 145.

The mix of the recording was poor in many places, but I tried looking at the "Audio Transients" (using the drop down below the audio track name which defaults to "Clips").

Bad results.

So I took the hard road and tried EQ to bring out the bass drum and bass parts. That was a complete waste of time -- the kick and bass came and went in the mix. The transients didn't seem to line up with the beats that well.

I thought, "if only I had a click track." Then a light came on, "DUH! Why not record a MIDI track with a bass drum hitting each beat of each measure?"

So, I created a MIDI track and set it to play the TTS-1 bass drum.

Then I turned off the metronome ("P" for Preferences, Project>Metronome -- deselect "Recording").

Armed the bass drum track, clicked the record button and started hitting the bass drum. I missed the first beat, but I had the recording set to start on the first beat. I could add the first kick drum data in Piano Roll View (PRV).

Before I go further, it's important to tell you that if your original recording starts on any beat other than beat one, you should insert some audio at the first of the original recording to fill in at least to where the first beat would be if there was audio in the whole first measure. For some reason, AudioSnap loves to consider silence as a measure zero and you cannot force it to do otherwise -- at least I couldn't.

If your added audio makes the first measure too long and it confuses AudioSnap, notice where AudioSnap wants to put the first beat and shorten your added audio to that location. Then right click your audio clip and select "Bounce to Clip(s)" to get rid of the extra audio data. Now AudioSnap should give you a first measure of the correct length for what it considers the average tempo of the recording -- and it should start measure/beat counting at 1:01:000.

After recording your bass drum MIDI track, you should expand the MIDI track so you can right click in the FX bin. Select MIDI Plugins>Cakewalk FX>Velocity, and click the "Set to" fader and set it to 127.

Now you have a strong bass drum beat. You can minimize the Velocity plugin.

Next, freeze the TTS-1. Bring up the synth rack -- I use "B" for that, and click the snowflake on the TTS-1.

Your TTS-1 output track will now have an audio click track with clean and definite beats. Select that audio clip and use the drop down to view the "audio Transients."

Open AudioSnap -- I use "A" to do that.

To use the Audiosnap window you have to have your click track selected.

Now click on "Edit Clip Map."

Here's where I had a problem that you might face. AudioSnap, though it guessed the average tempo correctly, wanted to put the measure markers as if they were half the tempo. Also, even though the beats were strong, I had to adjust the threshold in AudioSnap down to zero in order to see all transients. But, since the beats were strong, each beat had a transient.

To correct the markers on incorrect transients,  I clicked on the marker of the first beats of each measure, starting with measure two, and brought it in line with the correct transient for beat one of that measure. I continued on toward the end of the recording.

That's when another problem came up. I ran out of measure markers several measures before I was through lining everything up. Pulling the last visible transient toward the left locked Sonar down tight.

I had to re-record my MIDI kick track, and I made sure to record several measures of bass drum hits after the recording ended. This was so AudioSnap wouldn't run out of transient markers for me to drag. After doing that, I froze the drum track again and started dragging beat one to each appropriate measure.

Make sure to save your file regularly as you do this -- just in case.

Next, in the AudioSnap popup, I selected "Set Project from Clip." I clicked the drop down and chose "measure." The reason was that I knew at least the beginning beat of each measure was dead accurate. This causes a tempo map to be inserted into the project, with tempo changes whenever they are needed to keep the project file in synch with the original recording.

From this point on, you can create MIDI tracks or record audio tracks with the metronome activated, and whatever you record will be in synch with the tempo of the original recording.

You can now archive the MIDI/audio bass drum track -- or even delete them. It's great to be able to record parts while listening to the original recording -- and everything synchs up.

Note that you can do this same thing by recording a MIDI track with a beat on just the first beat of each measure. That results in fewer transients to have to deal with if you have to drag the measure/beat markers to the correct location.

I'm sharing this for what it's worth to those reading it. If you're new to sequencing, creating karaoke versions of songs is a great way to learn. It hones your ability to hear specific parts and block out others. It also helps critical listening -- and much more.

If you have some AudioSnap techniques you'd like to share, drop me an email or text file. I'll post it with full credit to you.

Finally, I apologize if this post is confusing. Any comments/suggestions on making it clearer/better will be appreciated and acknowledged.

The song I most recently used this technique on was "You Be Dead" from Duke Nukem II. You can find the results of my synching HERE ON SoundCloud. I also used the crossfading technique from the previous post.

Adding Volume AND Pan Control to Windows 7

How many times do you listen to sound on your PC and want to pan left or right? I do often enough to get tired of what is required to get to the "Balance" controls:

1. Click the Speaker icon.
2. Click Mixer (below the fader).
3. Click the icon for the Device you're listening to.
4. Click the Levels tab.
5. Click the Balance button.
6. Adjust the faders for "1" (Left) and "2" (Right).

Actually, having the individual settings can be helpful at times, but for quick pans, they're a pain.

Thanks to an Alan Henry post on Lifehacker, I learned of a small windows program, SimpleSndVol, that puts a new volume fader with a pan slider onto the task bar tray.

The download link on Alan's post has changed, and here's where to download the file as of this writing.

It's free, but donations are accepted.

After virus checking the file, install it -- and you'll end up with two volume controls -- the Windows one and the SimpleSndVol one (which may require clicking on the "Show hidden icons" up arrow to see).

To unhide SimpleSndVol and hide the Windows version:

1. Windows Start button.
2. Type "customize" in the search field.
3. Click "Customize icons on the taskbar."
4.  Set Volume to "Hide icon and notifications." It will still be available by clicking the "Show hidden icons" up arrow, and you may still want to use it.
5. Set SimpleSndVol to Show icon and notifications. It will "stick" to the taskbar now.
6. Click the "OK" button.

As for SimpleSndVol, here are my observations (this is for version SimpleSndVol-2.0.0.2):

1. It works! To check it out, I opened the Windows Balance faders (you can click the "Mixer" link on SimpleSndVol and follow the steps at the top of this post to see them). Then I panned left and right, watching the Windows Balance sliders move.
2. To jump to left, middle or right pan, the L, 0 and R below the slider will do the trick.
3. Clicking to the left or right of the slider will result in a 10% change in the balance in that direction. [Strangely enough, if the slider is at extreme right or left, that same clicking results in a 9% change up to 27% where it then starts making 10% changes again.]
4. The first time I right clicked the SimpleSndVol icon and selected "Settings," I received a .net error message. I chose to continue the program, clicked on "Settings" again, and it worked without an error.
5. For me, using the center scroll of the mouse when over the SimpleSndVol icon was a very slow method of volume control. It's easier to click and open the control. I'm pretty sure this depended on my mouse settings.
6. Middle clicking on the icon is a quick way to mute the sound.
7. Right clicking the icon gives you the same access to sound settings that you have with the Windows Volume control.
8. Some of the icons included with the program reflect the volume level without having to open the fader.
9. The SimpleSndVol control minimizes milliseconds after you move the mouse off it. It would be nice if it stayed on the screen even with an errant move off the control.

I give it a thumbs up and have made a donation to the author.

Visiting the Past

I'm revisiting the game music that I wrote almost two decades ago. It's an attempt to get it to sound like I imagined it with "real" instruments -- hopefully keeping the feel/personality of the original.

Luckily, I kept the original MIDI files (and Sequencer Plus Gold .SNG files).

Unluckily, I cannot find the instrument banks I slaved over to create the earliest FM synth songs. Maybe I failed to save them. That would be the equivalent of saving a sequencer file today and twenty years later remembering that you didn't save the instrument plugins that create the actual instrument sounds. YIKES! Double YIKES if they're pure synthesized sounds that you designed yourself, tweaking forever to get them just right for your music.

These old song files are in directories based upon the name of the project producer or the project. I started with the A's, and the first was "Alan." That would be Alan Blum, and the project was "Major Stryker," a SHMUP or Shoot 'em Up -- just "shooter" back in the day.

The first of many lessons I learned when working on the first song was I saved the  .MID files "back then" as Type 0 files. The reason: software that translated the MID file to a file containing a stream of Adlib card FM synth data required a "one track" MID file. Yes, all the data was on ONE MIDI track.

Luckily, most sequencers intelligently separate the one MIDI track into individual tracks for each MIDI channel.

This is the Sequencer Plus Gold file for SUPRNOVA. FM synth cards had limited polyphony. If you used "Percussive" Mode, you were more limited in polyphony (max. notes on at one time). "Melodic" mode had more polyphony, so I created the percussion sounds I needed. Here, I'm limited to 9 note polyphony. I put each instrument sound on a different track. The hihat has two channels, one for closed and one for open. The programs ("Prg"") were patch numbers. This sound bank was created by tweaking the patch closest to the sound I was looking for. So whatever instrument was originally in patch 6 sounded somewhat like a Kick, and changing the patch parameters got it to sound "acceptable." Here the track names are visible because this file was saved as a SPGold .SNG file.

Many was the time that I had to cut out percussion notes because the resulting game music file was too big. It was good practice in deciding which notes of a song were more important to get the idea across.

Unluckily, the original track names are not saved in Type 0 files, so the tracks, even on modern sequencers, are named "1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ...."

How was I to know what instrument was where? I used Sequencer Plus Gold (thanks to DosBox) to make new Type 1 MIDI files, with data saved for each individual track, including the track names. Now I knew the instrument I was striving for on the FM synth card.

You may be thinking that all I had to do was look at the patch number and I could tell which instrument was on which track. The problem with that is I created my own instruments and put them in all sorts of different patch "slots."

This situation was much like today where you select an instrument VST and decide what channel it will respond to. Then you may tweak the instrument/effects settings. Luckily for all of us, most modern sequencers store all of that information in the song file. But, you'd better keep a copy of your plugins and the sequencer software you use -- in twenty years the standards may be completely different.

The first song (again in alphabetical order) is CRUISINA.SNG, last saved 7/10/1992. There is also CRUISING.SNG dated 10/13/1993.

The "A" at the end of CRUISINA, stood for AdLib. It was the sound card of the day (with Creative Labs strong on it's heels). The "G" at the end of CRUISING stood for General MIDI, a 1991 standard that was becoming main stream with computer cards in 1993.

In 1992, a PC file was still limited to eight alphanumeric characters, so a file name like "Cruising With Stryker.MID" wouldn't work. Thus the cryptic file names you may see for "old" files.

This song was one of the first to use my heavily "tweaked" FM instruments, especially the overdrive/distortion guitar, which went into harmonics at just the right time for the tempo of the music. Here's the song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnPALu0E4YM

Here's a demo of the "real" (updated) version: https://soundcloud.com/bobbyprincemusic/cruising-with-stryker-demo

There's a certain feel to the original that the "real" one doesn't capture. Maybe it's because the music was written to the FM synthesized sounds?

Maybe it's the "warmth" of analog coming out of an early sound card?

I decided not to change the performance of the music in any way. Any "real" instrument performance is true to the original MIDI performance data. The biggest differences in the sounds are the drums and effects like reverb.

When I get more done on this project, I'll put some more "real" versions up on SoundCloud, with a post here about it.

The best music to each of you. Remember that Richard Rodgers wrote a song a day. While I'd love to hear the ones he closeted away, he'd probably turn over in his grave to know anyone ever heard any of them.

What would be your chances of having a Song of the Year if you wrote a song a day for a year and published your best seven?

Roland R-Mix Plugin

The most recent release of Cakewalk Sonar includes a plugin called "R-Mix." In short, it's a visual audio manipulation tool. It's like looking at sound as it's coming at you (as opposed to it scrolling by you from left to right).  It's great fun to roam a recording, choosing where in the stereo field to listen. It's like using a shotgun mike with an equalizer.

In the past I may have said that I learned to work with MIDI by taking songs apart and making backtracks. My brother was singing to backtracks at the time, but they were vocal removed tracks (using the LT Sound Vocal Remover that many of you may have seen heavily advertised in magazines "of the day"). Since vocal removal didn't work well on lots of records, there was still a need to record our own backtracks. The reason these records didn't "vocally remove" was the vocal remover would cut out any center track voices or instruments in the vocal range (usually the drums and bass). It had a low pass filter that would allow low frequencies on the center track to pass through, so you would get at least some bass and bass drum. And it wouldn't delete any reverb/echo outside of the center track.

It worked great on songs with only the lead singer in the center track with no effects. I remember the original "Layla" was one it worked perfectly on.

That said, R-Mix is vocal removal on steroids. You can create a rectangle or oval, size it and place it over the lead vocal, and adjust for maximum volume. Then you can reduce the volume of the selected area and bring up the volume of everything else. The result is vocal removal. You'll still have effects that may be outside your selection, but you can find a plugin for /reducing/removing reverb nowadays, too.

And speaking of backtrack recording, the hardest part of getting a backtrack right is hearing all the parts. With R-Mix it is MUCH easier. On many modern recordings, you can find a particular instrument and isolate it in the mix. I took some recordings I've done backtracks to in the past and heard things with R-Mix that I never heard listening to the whole mix. Such things as what effect is being used on an instrument, when the instrument is playing (in a muddy mix) and what the instrument is playing.

You can learnsome secrets of good mixing by slicing recordings up with R-Mix.

Why I Use A PC & Some Random Thoughts on "Making It In Music"

My main reason for using a PC is simple. It's Apple's poor job porting their software to PC's. iTunes for the PC is the most frustrating software I use. Rarely does it connect to an iPhone via WiFi. The settings are not in one place. It fails to load at times and I have to reboot. It gets a 10 out of 10 on the "Cussable Scale."

I have felt the same way about a lot of music and musical device software that was designed for an Apple and then poorly ported to Windows.

I am a music anarchist, and Apple's "ownership" of their software nauseates me, too.

You do not have to have the "best" machine, the "best" software, etc. to make music. You do have to write, write, write. Just the other day I read a list of songs Willie Nelson wrote. There were a whole bunch of them that I had never heard of. Let's say that 5% of what he wrote has "stuck." That's a phenomenal percentage! I bet the songs he wrote that didn't please him could fill up several filing cabinets, too.

If you wanna make it in the music business, you have to realize that it is mostly business that gets you to the goal of "making it." Probably 99.99999% of musicians hate business (except when it's time to get paid). We'd rather be playing. For this reason, you've got to find someone who loves marketing/business as much as you love music. If you do come into some good money, put a huge part of it on a publicist and a business manager. Make sure that they love what they do and would do it for free (but like to get paid just like you with your music :-)

I know plenty of musicians who are KILLER, but they did not have the heart for the business/marketing end of things. They play a lot locally, but never did get discovered.

Who Makes a Song More Than the Sum of Its Parts?

Before answering the question, if you're interested in composing music for film, here's a very interesting article entitled:

Crowded Out of Eden: Composers and the Hollywood Dream BY JONATHAN RHODES LEE

As a provider of music for film, gaming, whatever, you have to thank your lucky stars to come upon a producer/director that lets you do what you feel is right for a project. I have been on both sides of the coin, but, thankfully, mostly on the side where the final decision was to go with what I thought was best from the start.

The best situation is where you are given ideas of where the producer/director would like to see things go -- without specifying how to get there. I'm lucky enough at the present time to be working with these kind of  people.

And now, for my answer to the question posed in the title of this blog entry: Arrangers and Orchestrators. These are far and above the most screwed musicians in the history of the industry. As you see from Mr. Lee's article, they have been left out of credits since the beginning. Yet they can take a mediocre song and turn it into a hit.

What pushed me to write about this (I've thought it for decades) was listening to music of the 50's and 60's that bridged the gap between the rock/blues and and 40's pop music.

It's only fairly recently that we are finding out who the arrangers/orchestrators were for much of this music. It's about time!

For an example of a songwriter who also was an arranger, listen to Morning Girl by Neon Philharmonic. It was written and arranged by Tupper Saussy (his true name). Notice that early stereo mix! Harpsichord Rock on one side, lush orchestration on the other side. Make sure to listen through to the end -- the strings go where rock and roll instrumentation just wouldn't cut it.

How many songs are there that were made by a musician's invention of a musical hook? The instrumental  riffs that bring a whole song to mind, like the riff in My Girl. The guitarist is Robert White.

By the way, you did notice the orchestral arrangement in the song, didn't you? That's the Detroit Symphony Orchestra -- they were involved in many Motown recordings.

These days, there is no excuse to leave out credit for any of the people who bring a song to life.

My Backup Solution

In a previous post, I talked about online backup. Since that time, I have been trying a new method of backing up -- this one local. After researching tape based backup and realizing that it is very expensive and still not that trustworthy, I came upon external devices that allow you to plug in a standard SATA hard drive. These devices can be connected via USB, SATA and/or eSATA (maybe Firewire, too). I went with a Thermaltake BlacX eSATA USB Docking Station, a SATA to eSATA bracket with cable to extend one of the motherboard SATA connections to the rear of the computer, and a couple of 2TB drives. The docking station came with a short eSATA cable that connects it to the bracket at the rear of the computer.

Now I have an external SATA drive bay and can can alternate backing up critical data to two different external drives. Thankfully, I haven't needed the backups, but it's good to know they're there.

The docking station was around $35. The bracket was around $5. The two drives were a bit over $200. All of this was a lot less expensive than any other solution I could find.

Software for this solution is another story. I've tried a several programs and none of them feel trustworthy to me. Storing data with a non-standard software protocol leaves me at the mercy of a software vendor that may not be there tomorrow. I'll post what I decide upon here. Until then, it's once a week zip files of each directory.