how to align acapella's to a beat?

[sounddust]

what's your method like?
stretch it?
chop it up? sentence by sentence?

how do you determine the exact bpm?

i never seem to be able to fit it to a beat properly.....

thanks...

[nobbus]

what program are you using?

[sounddust]

depends...
got pro tools
acid
soundforge

[funky49]

FINDING THE ORIGINAL TEMPO

Within SoundForge/etc, grab a looped 1 beat or 1 measure of 'beat' from the original track the acapellas are from. Make sure it is PERFECTLY looped. Zoom deeper and deeper into the start and stop points until you find the very beginning of what is usually a kick drum. Now play it looped, does it sound right? If no, go refind the start/stop points. If yes, go to Special-Edit Temp (in SoundForge) and correct the value for "Selection Length in Beats". 4 beats for your shortest loop length usually but could be 8 or 16. The value in your "Number of beats per minute" box is going ot be very close to the BPM/tempo of the acapellas. Try this a few times with beat loops from different parts of the song. If you're attempting this with some freestyle jazz tune it probably will be faster and slower in parts. If you're attempting this with a dance record (sequenced with hardware/software) its (usually) going to be the same tempo from start to finish.

MATCHING UP

In Acid, set the tempo of your Acid project to the tempo you found from the step above. I like to bring out a beat that works well with this tempo that's only used for reference. Drag this into your project. You're going to have to reference the original tune and figure out what word is used on the downbeat. You know the downbeat, its the point in the tune when you're bobbing your head and your chin is in the lowest position. Match up the acapella downbeat words with the downbeat of the beat you have looped.

REFINE IT

I like to break up my verses into different wav files. This way I align up each verse seperately of each other and achieve a tighter fit.

good luck remixers!

[sounddust]

thanks
so i guess it'll stay hard work choppin' it up by hand per verse and such if you wan't it to sound convincing...
thought there might be some plugin to do it for me :-)

[danfly100]

What i'll do is take the original of the song whose acapella you want to remix. I use Cool Edit Pro, but chances are all your programs will do this:

Try to highlight an entire loop (4/8/16 beats, usually) of the original song as perfectly as you can. Use the shift key to perfect the edges of the highlighted area. Somehwere in one of your toolbars, it should tell you the exact length (mine's set to seconds, with three decimal places) of the area you've selected. Write this number down.

Now, open the acapella, and open a stock drumbeat or sample sound (it doesn't matter which, because you can always change it easily). Stretch the sample to fit this number you wrote down before. Don't be afraid to half or double this number if your samples are getting too slow or too fast. Then, duplicate it about 40 times, paste it into your mix, and see if it matches. If you find that your acapella is getting ahead of the beat, try making the loop a fraction of a second shorter, re-duplicate, and try again. If your vocals are too slow, try shortening the sample slightly. Fine tune, and once you've got the perfect length, replace your original number (you've written down) with the length of your new, perfect loop length.

Then, you can open and sample whatever you please and just stretch it to this length. Remember that the sample length you've figured out only works for the number of beats in your original sample. So if there's four beats in a bar, and you've figured out that four beats are 2.678 sec in length, then you know a sample with eight beats should be either twice as long, or will sound twice as fast and be an octave higher in pitch.

There's a little math involved, but I've used this system for years, and it's served me very well. Once you get the hang of it, you'll understand.

Finding the tempo is always a good method, and is more like what you might do as a DJ with turntables, so if you feel more comfortable doing that, by all means do it. Hope this helps.

[DJ_Skrilla]

what's your method like?
stretch it?
chop it up? sentence by sentence?

how do you determine the exact bpm?

i never seem to be able to fit it to a beat properly.....

thanks...

U could JUST buy some turntables, grab some hot wax (tt5b acapella album) slap it on the 1's and 2's, match the tempo to the BPM of the acapella, then fuck it up. Everyone will think you are cool if you can do that...

[rirv]

I just load the acapella into Acid, find the downbeat in the rap and match it up with a beat and then fiddle with the BPM til it's right and fits the whole track. Works everytime.

[~Disco Breakin~]

how do you "start over" beatmap/re-beatmap a song in Acid?

GLenn

[funky49]

how do you "start over" beatmap/re-beatmap a song in Acid?

GLenn

Try re-opening the wav file you want to work with.