Figuring out tempo

[wakeupbomb]

Recently I've been trying to work with acapella tracks to make my own remixes (a just for fun kind of thing to see if I can do it) and I'm having a problem with finding the tempo of songs. I sit there with my drum machine and speed up or slow down the tempo based on the original song with the instruments....and it's taking me way to long to get it to match. Is there any easy way to find the tempo of acapella songs, so that I can set a tempo for the midi that I'm programming? Thanks.

[AlChuck]

Set a stopwatch for a minute, and count the beats. Even if you don't hit the stopwatch perfectly on a beat or the minute ends not exactly on a beat, you'll nail it.

[TexRoadkill]

In most DAW software you can also select an area then specify that is X beats or measures. It's used a lot in film scoring. It's probably called Fit Tempo to Selection or something like that.

[AlChuck]

Yeah, tex, but that only works well with clear transients on the beats -- a drum part or a very clear percussive rhythm sound of some kind. It probably would not work on a capella stuff too well.

[wakeupbomb]

I work with protools LE. Is there something on there that I could highlight a section of the soundwave and it can tell me the BPM? Thanks for the stopwatch idea by the way, I'm gonna try that, but I want a deffinitive answer from the program I'm using. Other then Pro Tools I have cool edit pro, fruity loops, and reason, is there anything in these programs that would work for what I'm trying to do? I'm just trying to give myself as many options as possible. Thanks again.

[AlChuck]

I'm sure Pro Tools and most other software has this capability. The trouble is, it's easy for the software to tell elapsed time from a selection... but not so easy to detect how many beats there are, and virtually impossible if nothing is playing on the beat (a melodic line alone with lots of rests, long and short tones and phrases). It's also hard for it to detect just where the attack of the beat is meant to be when the sound that does hit on the beat is not very transient.

Here's a solution - record yourself clacking a pair of sticks together or playing a MIDI snare note right on the beat along with the pre-recorded a capella tracks you want to work with, just like you were tapping your feet to it. Then you can use this track of nice clear transients to give the software something to be able to reliably detect and thereby be able to calculate BPM.

[sync]

Musebook Metronome has a feature where you can tap with the mouse or keyboard and it will give you the tempo.
http://www.musebook.com/?page=mbmetronome

[wakeupbomb]

Thanks everyone. I'm gonna try and take the original song (with the beats and music and everyting) and put that into Pro Tools, and that should give clear transients. Does anyone know what parameter in Pro Tools I would use to find out the tempo? Thanks again.

[AlChuck]

I tried the SONAR thing again (it's been a while), and it's really a pain to use if you just want BPM information. The way it works is, you apply it to a chunk of audio, and it generates MIDI events and can use those to generate a tempo map. So after you go through a few steps you see some indication of the BPM but it's likely to be changing almost measure-by-measure by a tad, like 108.45 for one meaure and 108.57 for the next. You can pretty much tell that it's basically 108-109 overall but it's really a pain to go through all the steps to get there. I'd sooner count and time...