A fixed tempo is fine when working with most “electronic” music, but what if you’re trying to do a timeline show to a piece of music where the tempo may change - typically classical music, but some “pop” tracks (eg. “Come on Eileen”) can have parts that slow down or speed up.
Is there a way to deal with that? Perhaps a segmented timeline or suchlike?
I’ve taken drifting songs into Ableton and realigned the grid. Export and done. Caveat is some song are near impossible to regrid . Hint - Oxygene 2
That sounds like an idea - although I had thought that Ableton was for live busking. I need to look at Ableton’s capabilities.
OK - now I see that Ableton is quite like GarageBand
Ha! My first laser-accompanied music track was Equinoxe (done with Laser Show Gen)
1 Like
Hi Alex!
There’s a tempo map feature in the timeline!
Click the TEMPO MAP button to enable it and you’ll see an extra row appear at the top of the timeline.
Right-click anywhere on that row to add a tempo change, then right-click the marker again to open the panel and adjust the tempo. You can add as many tempo changes as you like, so it should work for any music that speeds up or slows down. (And now I want to try the challenge of syncing up Come on Eilleen!)
Hope that helps!
Seb
2 Likes
Brilliant! How could I have not seen this. So many buttons!
I’ve looked around for video tutorials on timeline use without much success. All I’m trying to do right now is get the tempo synced to an audio track on the timeline. Seems that tapping isn’t an option - as soon as you start tapping, the timeline audio switches off!
If I simply listen to the track outside of Liberation, and use the tap feature, it gives me a BPM that varies between 84 and 85, so I could put in 84.5. Then when I play the track, I inevitably get a bit of drift.
Apologies - this must be a really really basic question, so in terms of an answer, I’m hoping for “Just read this bit of the manual” or “take a look at this video”
Hi Alex,
You’re not missing something obvious, so don’t worry. That part of the manual is still very much a work in progress. I have been slightly avoiding it because there are a few timeline improvements I want to make first (including proper tap tempo recording).
For now, this is the workflow I use:
- Add the audio track into the timeline and make sure it is snapped to a beat so that the first downbeat of the music lines up exactly with the start of a bar.
- If the audio does not naturally start on a downbeat, you have two options:
- Right-click the audio clip and adjust the delay setting until the first downbeat lines up.
- Or trim the audio externally (for example in Audacity) so the file starts exactly on the first downbeat.
It’s important to make sure that the start of the track is lined up with a beat or a bar otherwise the start position of the music will shift backwards and forwards as you change the tempo, and that will make this process infinitely harder!
- If you have a rough tempo, enter that into the timeline tempo and start playback from the beginning.
- Watch the beat and bar markers very closely (the four flashing squares
︎:white_medium_square:
︎:white_medium_square:︎). If they start drifting against the music, stop, adjust the tempo slightly one way or the other, and try again. - For most modern music, the tempo is a fixed whole-number BPM. Once you find it, it should stay locked for the entire track.
- Use the audio waveform as a visual guide. The peaks should line up with the vertical bar markers in the timeline.
- Tip: zoom in and out of the timeline using the mouse wheel or trackpad gesture, and scroll left and right using the side scroll wheel or horizontal gesture. Working zoomed-in makes this much easier.
If the track is not a whole-number BPM, the drift will be more gradual, so zoom in further and make smaller tempo adjustments until it holds over a longer section.
If the music genuinely speeds up and slows down, then the process is the same but done in sections. Watch the beat markers and add tempo changes in the tempo map wherever needed.
As a last resort, you can use something like Logic Pro to analyse the track and generate a tempo map automatically, although this usually produces a lot of tempo markers (often one per bar), which can be overkill.
If there’s a specific track you’re struggling with, let me know and I’ll happily put together a quick video showing the process.
Seb
1 Like
Thanks for that. I think my track (“Go” from Public Service Broadcasting) seems to be a smidge over 87 bpm, and I can’t enter fractional BPMs in the timeline tempo. I’m thinking that I could squish the track a little in some utility to make it a second or so longer (bringing the BPM down to exactly 87).
But I’m also feeling guilty for giving you things to look at when you should be relaxing. I’m going to down tools for the day myself!
You should be able to add fractional tempos! Double click on the tempo setting in the timeline? If you can’t edit it, it may be because Tempo Map is enabled?
A post was split to a new topic: Synchronising the timeline to a audio track tempo
Have you tried turning off TEMPO MAP first ?
Ah yes… How foolish - it was just reverting to the BPM specified on the timeline (which can be changed to 175.1 if you want) . Still, as you determined, it really is 175.0 for Go.
It’s my bad, the interface still needs refinement, but at least you’ve got it working now!
A post was split to a new topic: Liberation workshops?
I usually use this website for tempo detection:
1 Like
Interesting - that came back with 87. Seb’s 175 is the correct answer. So I’d accept 87.5!
I have one tiny suggestion on timeline, mostly based on other timeline editors, which is would it be possible to make the spacebar do stop/start?
As long as the Liberation timeline is enabled and you are not synched to an external source, the space bar should do play/pause! If that’s not happening for you let me know!
Seb