MOTUNATION • View topic - The Digital Performer Tips Sheet 12/28/10 7:16 PM

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Beat Detection Engine, "How To"
by magicd » Mon Mar 16, 2009 8:17 am

Using the Beat Detection Engine

This is a reprint of an old post:

Let's start at the beginning. The Beat Detection engine in DP is a core technology. From that core technology we can do some interesting things.

DP can look into an audio file and detect what it sees as beats in the audio.
It's possible to turn off beat detection, and there are circumstances under which DP will not analyze for beats unless you tell it to. Beats are visible as faint
blue vertical lines when looking at soundbites in the Sequence Editor. If you open the audio in DPs waveform editor and select the Beats tab, the beats are
marked with bold blue lines that also show velocity handles.

The first thing to understand about beats is that they are markings within the audio. When DP scans for beats, it has to make decisions. For example, if I
hit a fat note on my Ric bass, the oscillations of the decaying note create beats as the string bounces against the frets. DP detects the beats at the
oscillation points. Another common example is a partly open hi-hat. As the hi-hat swishes back and forth, DP can detect the "swishes" as individual
beats. One thing that DP does very well is to find the beginning of the note as the beat point. The beat is not placed on the peak amplitude of a hit. DP
finds the peak amplitude, then looks back to find the beginning of the rise of the hit. This helps notes from being chopped at the beginning.
Because there is interpretation going on here, you may disagree with the decisions that DP makes. There are also times when DP gets it right, but you
want to make modifications to the found beats anyway. For example, lets say I've got a grace note or a run of notes, and I want to see that phrase as a
single musical event. In cases like these, you will want to be able to edit the beats before you do any other operations. In general, it's a very good idea to
be aware of what beats are in the audio before you start to actually use BDE tools.

Workflow:
Make sure DP has found beats in the audio by looking at the audio either in the Sequence Editor or Waveform Editor. If beats are not present, select the
audio and choose Find Beats In Selection from the Beats drop down menu (to the far right of the Beats tab).

You can create beats, delete beats, move beats, and mute beats. Remember that a beat is only a marking within the soundfile. Moving, deleting, or
changing a beat (or velocity handle) does nothing to the audio. It just informs DP as to the beat locations within the file.

Editing beats is done in the Waveform Editor. Clicking on the beat will audition the audio that is described by the beat. It's possible you may want to
manually create individual beats, but it's more likely that you will be deleting, moving, or muting beats. In the work I've done, I mute beats as opposed to
deleting them. I've not yet had occasion to create or move beats.

You have several tools available to work with. First, select a range of audio, then go to the Audio menu and choose either Adjust Beat Sensitivity or
Adjust Beat Detection. The two commands do very similar things. Both commands give you a window with a threshold slider and Apply button. Adjust
Beat Sensitivity works with relative amplitudes of beats (just like Recycle). Adjust Beat Detection works with musical priority probability (!). I generally
use Adjust Beat Detection. It is a very smart command and does an excellent job of weeding out false or minor hits. The bottom line is that in order for
BDE to do predictable things, the detected beats need to relevant to the musical task. I find simplification to usually be a good thing.

You can also use the Mute tool from the DP Toolbar to mute or unmute individual beats. This works well as clean-up after using Adjust beat Sensitivity
or Detection.

Workflow:
Check the found beats to make sure they describe what you want to actually work with. Mute, move, delete or create beats to achieve this.

So now we have beats that make musical sense. What can we do with this information? To start, you can make selections based on beats. There is now a
second Edit Grid button in the upper left hand corner of the Sequence Editor. When this is lit, selections will snap to beats. One cool trick here is that if
you make a selection in one waveform, then drag so that other waveforms are also selected, all the selected waveforms will snap to the beats within the
waveform where you originally clicked. You can not make beat based selections within the sequence Editor ruler. You make the selection within the
waveforms directly.

Now that we've made a beat based selection, we can edit with those selections. You can use the Split command to make new soundbites based on beat
selections. You can use the scissor tool to cut at beat markings. Clicking and dragging with the scissor tool selected cuts the audio at the beat marks for as
far as you drag. Excellent for chopping up dialog or individual notes.

Cutting at beat boundries can also be done as a batch. Select the soundbite or soundbites, and choose Create Soundbites from Beats from the Audio
menu. You get a slider and apply button. You also get a pop-up menu that shows all the selected soundbites. You can slice up soundbites based on their
individual beats or you can use a single track as a guide and slice all selected audio using a single soundbites as the reference. If you want, you can then

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MOTUNATION • View topic - The Digital Performer Tips Sheet 12/28/10 7:16 PM

quantize those soundbites.

It is possible to time stretch audio in DP. You can use beats to quantize audio hits within soundbites. If you want to quantize beats within phase related
tracks, you must first choose a single beat map and copy that to all the tracks you want to quantize. If you don't do that, there could be different beat maps
within different tracks and therefore those tracks will not be exactly aligned with each other if you quantize.

Workflow:
Open the Sequence Editor window and display the tracks you want to quantize and keep phase aligned.
Select all.
Choose Copy Beats from the Audio menu. You'll get a small window that allows you to select the master track that all other selected tracks will copy
beats from. There's a threshold slider and Apply button. You should have already picked your master beat track (typically snare or kick), and thinned out
the found beats to specifically what you want to quantize. Apply the copy. Now you can select all those tracks and quantize beats within soundbites, and
you will get the same quantizing for each track.

Quantizing is based on a sequence grid. If the tempo of your audio matches the sequence tempo already, quantizing is a easy. If tempo does not yet
match, you must match the sequence tempo to the soundbite before you quantize. There are several ways to do this. DP will attempt to analyze the tempo
of the audio based on the beats described. There are many ways to fool DP with this process. For example, what's the difference between 60bpm and
120bpm? What happens when the drummer plays a three over four feel on the hat, but a straight four with the kick? One example I looked at had steady
tempo and then a two bar rest, during which the tempo of the overall track changed. Check the sequence tempo by turning on the metronome in DP. If the
metronome agrees with the audio, tempo is good. Remember to turn on the Conductor track if there are tempo variations in the audio, otherwise DP will
use a single straight tempo as defined by the tempo slider.

In general I've found that with loops and obvious transients in the audio, DP does a good job of detecting tempo. I've also found that you can definitely
fool DPs tempo detection a number of ways. In the case of Tempo Changes From Hell (good name for an avant-jazz band), I may ask DP to calculate
tempo automatically, but it's more likely I will use the Adjust Beats command from the Project menu>Modify Conductor Track to do this. Here again,
audio beats are indispensable. You can snap barlines to audio beats with this command and it makes creating a tempo map quick and accurate. I do this
all the time and have yet to find a musical example where I couldn't make an accurate tempo map.

Workflow:
Before you quantize beats or soundbites, make sure the tempo map is accurate and make sure the Sequence Tempo is Copied to Soundbites (Audio
menu).

You can also create and apply grooves. This is a MIDI process that can also be applied to audio beats. The groove template is region based, so make sure
of the region that is selected when you create and apply the groove. This is where the velocity handles come in. Groove Quantize works with timing,
velocity and duration. Grooves can be created and applied from and to MIDI and audio.

Hope that helps!

Dave

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Re:
by snakejred » Tue Jun 02, 2009 1:14 am

WOW NICE

chamelion wrote:I'd like to offer a very cool tip that can help you to streamline level-setting during a mix:

Category: Obscure (at least to me) keyboard controller.

Description: Create the effect of a temporary group with any set of faders, regardless of whether or not the tracks selected belong to existing
groups.
Works: During mixdown

OK, you're geting close to a mix, and everything's sounding good. You're fine-tuning your level on the the master fader prior to pulling in a
compressor, but you're getting the odd clip light on the master fader. You need to locate the culprit/s, and adjust levels without altering their
relative relationships within the mix.

The amazing 'W' trick!:

1. Hide all channels in the mixing console except the ones you want to temporarily group and tweak.

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