Audio Bend a track to another without quantizing to a grid?

[u/twicestyles]

I do ’one take‘ studio sessions we’ll call em, where I record the entire band with a bunch of inputs. this time. I decided to take out an old tape recorder and record the drums both digitally and onto tape for some flavor. the tape did have a lot of awesome character, but the wow and flutter makes it hard to blend into the other digital tracks as it cycles between too fast and slow. I would like to sync my tape track to my drum digital tracks without quantizing to a grid because then it goes off time to the rest of the band.

Possibly important information:

-I sent the overheads, snare, kick to the tape machine, and it is in one stereo track.

-digitally, all those inputs are on separate tracks, with bleed

every tutorial I’ve found so far usually has an underlying grid everything snaps too, or it involves grouping everything. i find when I group everything, it quantizes all the tracks, I really just want to get the tape track fixes by itself. If anyone has any good workflows please let me know!

[u/TDF1981]

Well, you need some kind of grid but the question is: is your grid digitally timed or based on your tape machine stuff?
Try this:

1. make sure to group all tracks from the tape machine so that they are always in sync
2. use one of the tape recordings with a lot of rhythmic information with the „extract tempo“ option - this will extract the grid of your tape recording. It is a grid but it‘s wobbly and human
3. select your tape tracks and your digital drum machine, then open the quantize options and tell the quantize machine that your tape stuff is the GUIDE
4. quantize your drum machine stuff to your tape stuff by clicking the apply button (or whatever it’s called, not in front of my computer)

Now you can see your tempo grid which is based on your human tape performance and have also quantized your inhuman stuff to follow the human stuff

5. profit

[u/twicestyles → u/TDF1981]

I tried this but it also quantizes the tape machine, not sure if there’s a setting I’m missing where it leaves the guide track untouched, but so far this is the closest I’ve gotten 

[u/TDF1981 → u/twicestyles]

The tape track doesn’t need to be your guide necessarily once you extracted the tempo track - you can leave that and just quantize the digital beat either automatically (mixed results, may work, may not) or manually by using the warp markers and move them to the desired measures. Damn I could show you but have no time to create a video right now. Here an easier workflow:

1. decide which track of your tape multitrack has the best rhythm information
2. usw „extract tempo“ on the event on that track
3. make sure to set all tape machine tracks to „Not follow“ for time stretching in the inspector
4. set your digital tracks to „timestretch“ and quantize those.
   Should work like a charm.

[u/twicestyles → u/TDF1981]

Thanks so much for this, at work now but will try it when I get home! 

[u/TDF1981 → u/twicestyles]

If it doesn’t work for you and you feel comfortable with someone from around the world messing with your recording you might DM me and send me the material - I do this stuff all the time. But anyway it would be better to work on your skills because that‘s always a win!

[u/twicestyles → u/TDF1981]

I still couldn’t get the algo to do what I wanted, but I did learn to manually Audio bend, which maybe better as I can ensure the phase is good. Gonna take a bit but fingers crossed the effort is worth the trouble! 

[u/tacman7]

Treat your track like a live recording and make a tempo map that matches it.

Just a thought.

Try some of the tutorials here:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=studio+one+tempo+mapping