[ardour-users] some usage questions

[vanDongen/Gilcher]

On Thursday 29 December 2005 01:53, jbs (sent by Nabble.com) wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
> I'm very new to serious audio tools and ardour specifically so I appologize
> ahead of time. These are all questions I couldn't find an answer to through
> google and experimentation.
>
> 1) How would you go about aligning a drum track recorded from hydrogen with
> say a song sample?
>
I would normally try to set the drum sample to the tempo of the song first.
Best way is to run hydrogen synced with ardour and only record the drum sample 
if it is at the right tempo. This means finding the tempo of the song.
You can calculate that if you make  a new region that is exactly one bar long, 
or better yet a couple of bars:
1)divide the length in seconds by the number of beats (=number of bars times 
the number of beats-per-bar).
2)this is the number of seconds per beat. Now divide 60 by that number and you 
have your basic BPM=beats per minute
Set the tempo on the tempo ruler to this
Move your song sample so that the first beat is on the start of a bar.
Now use the snap to beats/bars/quarter-beats settings to place your drum 
samples and to stretch/shrink them using the timeFX tool.
Ideally your drum samples should already be at the calculated bpm.
But these calculations are always of a little so splitting into bars and beats 
and then carefully placing them by ear is often neccesary. Once you have that 
you can bounce the drums to a new track to create a single region to make 
editing easier. Or you can use chunks, but I find the chunks cumbersome and 
sometimes still buggy to work with. IMHO it is a feature that still needs 
work.

> I have tried splitting the drums into new regions every bar (or more
> frequently if necessary) and then using the timefx tool to align each
> region with the song track, but this was tedious and I couldn't quite
> comprehend the timefx tool. Is there a way to stretch a region backwards
> while anchoring the end of the region? 
no



> Is it possible to simultaneously 
> stretch and shrink two bordering regions, i.e. stretching the one region
> and squeezing the other while keeping them flush with eachother on their
> border?
no
> 2) Is there a way to make the BBT ruler start again at 0 at ab arbitrary
> point on the timeline? 
no, but it would be a good feature
> What about adding a tempo change at an arbitrary 
> point (NOT on a beat)? I don't see how this ruler has any use unless you
> can do these things.
No,  it should be possible but requires some heavy reworking of the bbt 
concept in ardour.


>
> 3) For working with left and right channels of a stereo track separately
> (e.g. with plugins), is the accpeted procedure to send the output of the
> track to two separate busses for left and reight and then send those busses
> to the master input? Or is there a way to 'split' the channels in ardour
> forming two mono tracks?
>
There is no right or wrong way to do this. You can do whatever works for you.
When importing multi-channel files and samples you can choose to split them 
into mono files. (Well ardour splits them anyway, but normally you get to see 
the file as a single multi-channel file.

> 4) Would I get a clue by reading something on ProTools or the like, or are
> these things pretty idiomatic to ardour?

These issues are pretty ardour specific, but reading on protools will give you 
a pretty good idea of audio editing concepts used in ardour and many other 
programs.

hope this helps a bit
Gerard