Best way to get control of melodic lines?

[keithpurtell]

I may be doing things the hard way. Would like some advice from more experience people here. I'm building an arrangement that has "layers" of instruments, with some using one type of rhythm and others another. Strong need to keep every instrument in line for the best outcome. Anyway the current problem is a rhythm mode that starts with two guitars. One does a simple repeating chord motif. I took that outside Reaper and edited in Audacity. Pretty simple just an alternating chord that repeats. I used a click track in Audacity to keep it on time since my playing is less than pro. Now the problems with the second guitar playing a repeating guitar melody-line motif. Thought the best way to keep it interweaving with the chords was the same click track. Turns out tweaking the notes visually by aligning notes with click track yields lame results. Not a good way to estimate the placement/duration of eighth notes/sixteenth notes. So now I'm looking for some way to have the software "play" my recorded/sampled acoustic guitar with the precision of sheet-music note values. Kinda the same thing as you might do with drum/percussion except this time trying to set the placement and timing of music notes not percussive strokes. Any suggestions for a frustrated newbie?

 

[Armistice]

Not sure exactly what you're doing here, but if you have Reaper, then you have little need of going "outside" to Audacity. Set your rhythm up in Reaper using the MIDI editor and whatever you can find to make a noise as a click/rhythm track and keep everything there and you'll have less problems syncing things up.

It's also hard to get software to compensate for poor playing by tweaking a time line of a continuous sound source like a guitar line. You may just have to learn to play better.

But I may not be understanding your needs here, so apologies if I have it wrong or this is of no use....

 

[gecko zzed]

What Armistice says ^^

It's easy to align your first guitar to a tempo within Reaper by zooming in on it, then splitting the track and shifting bits around (or stretching and contracting bits using Alt CLick).

 

[RAMI]

I was walking around downtown New York the other day, when this guy carrying a guitar asked me how to get to Madison Square Garden.

I said "Practice".

 

[keithpurtell]

Thanks a million everyone for the Reaper/MIDI/Alt Click advice! I'll get to work on it!