It Should Have Been Cut Faster

Tool Thursday with Jed Hackett.

Have you ever been in the middle of overdubs and the artist or A&R person says “I don’t know... it just feels slow to me. Can you speed it up?” Fun, isn’t it. To an extent you can varispeed the track but at a certain threshold things just get silly. You can use Pitch n’ Time, which I think is the best of the time stretch tools, but even that seriously degrades the quality of your audio. You could recut but there goes your budget. So what do you do? A friend of mine and I developed a great way to speed up tracks without sacrificing all of that hard work you put in to get great sounds.
Let me first say that this is extremely time consuming but left with no other good option, it works great!

1) Use Pitch ‘n Time on a rough mix to figure out what the new tempo should be. You don’t want to guess wrong and do all of this work for nothing.

2) Make a duplicate copy of your session just in case things go horribly wrong

3) Group all of your tracks together

4) Make a duplicate playlist of all of your tracks including the click

5) Make sure all of your fades are in order and consolidate your tracks, all from the same start position to the end of the song

6) Ungroup all of your tracks and chop the click up at every 16th note (You can do eighth notes if no one is playing anything faster than eighths)

7) Regroup all of your tracks and make sure that the tab feature is set to tab to the edge of every region, not the waveform.

8) Place your cursor at the beginning of the song and tab to the first break in the click. Break all of the audio tracks at that point.

9) Make a new grid, starting from that first click, at your faster tempo

Now comes the tedious part

10) Tab to the next break in the click and break all of the audio

11) Leave your curser at that break, go to grid mode, and shift click to the new grid mark for that beat

12) Go to Shuffle mode and delete the region you just highlighted. This will move everything up to the new grid mark.

13) Repeat steps 10-12 until you are either at the end of the song or the end of your rope! Check how things are sounding after a few bars just to make sure you are on the right path... because it is a very long path.

14) Save another duplicate copy of your session just in case something goes wrong in this next step

15) Ungroup your tracks and start smoothing out all of your edit points. For the most part you can just get rid of the edits on an instrument that occur in the middle of a note. In the case of some longer sustained notes you may have to mess with the end of the notes a bit to get things to sound right. For example, if your drum kit is for the most part an eighth note pattern you can simply get rid of the edits that occur on the 16th notes and crossfade at the beginning of every eighth note. You may however have a guitar note that is held out, and in order for the end of the note to sound natural you may have to crossfade at some point during the note to get a natural ending. This method of speeding things up works even with the occasional triplet fill or lick, just drag the edit points to the beginning of the notes. Every once in a while you may have to nudge a lick here or there depending on how far you are moving the tempo. Vocals can be tricky with this but of the 5 or 6 tracks that I have done this way we only had to recut vocals on one because the phrasing got a little to weird.

16) Consolidate your new tracks when you have all of the edits smoothed out

17) Go to your regions menu and get rid of the thousands of unused regions that you just created. Et Fine!

I used this method for a couple of songs on a country record and 3 or 4 songs on a metal record. On both projects the tracks needed to be sped up anywhere between 5 - 10 bpm. Not an ideal situation to be in but you have to give the artists and labels what they want. It took me about 2 days per track, so it is not a quick fix but in the end the sonic integrity of your recording is maintained and you will be surprised at how natural it sounds. Just put on NPR or some republican talk radio show, depending on your political slant, while your chopping the tracks up and it won’t seem so bad.

Take care,
Jed