Is audio quantizing possible?

O

old_dog

New member
I've just started trying to record my (blues) guitar playing alongside a backing track and I'm finding the timing of my guitar licks is somewhat lacking when I come to listen to it afterwards. Maybe I start the lick a fraction late or finish it a little early, but what feels OK when I'm jammin along to the backing track doesn't sound so good afterwards. This is not a latency problem as I've tried recording to a tape player through a mike and get the same. Solution 1 is to practise until my timing is perfect which could take a long time given that this is a background hobby. Solution 2 is to somehow correct the timing using either some quantization utility (if it exists) or manually editing the waveform using an audio editor. My best idea was to mess with time stretching and time shrinking before and after a lick to maintain the same overall time, but this is really long winded. Ideally I'd like to be able to mark points in the waveform and quantize them. Has anyone else had to deal with this problem and come up with a good solution?
 
Drum machine?

Maybe you can listen to a drum loop on headphones while recording the guitar part? This seems to be the easiest solution ... the other stuff sounded like it would be difficult.

T
 
You can cut and paste individual notes or phrases and make them start a bit earlier or later... but isn't that cheating? ;) Especially for blues music... tsk tsk tsk...
 
Thanks for the suggestions so far. Yeah I know it's cheating but blues beats can be between 55-65 bpm so locking on to the beat while you're playing is not so easy as with faster tempos, especially if you're letting loose with some fast solos. Besides it's for my own hobby purposes so no harm done, and I figure some major editing gets done on commercially produced tracks so my conscience is clear.

My sound card is a SB Live Platinum (P3-850 with 384Mb Win98SE, WinMe, Win2K on different hard disks that plug into a removable drive bay - by far the easiest multi-boot environment imho) and I use all kinds of software to generate backing tracks - Reason, Orion, Music Maker, Acid, Music Studio, n-Track, Soundforge (I like playing with this stuff). The thing I'm working on at the moment is putting a guitar solo track on top of a 'Stormy Monday Blues' backing track that I got on a magazine cover disk. So while I'm experimenting I just play the track on my stereo system while playing along with my guitar/amp and record the whole thing through a mike into soundforge. This is where I've discovered my timing is not perfect - it's not bad, but a few milliseconds here and there make a big difference to the feel of a blues solo. When I get further along with the solo I'll record the guitar part as a separate track and mess with it in soundforge or similar until I'm happy with it. All help with editing techniques gratefully received!

Thanks
 
Whenever possible, make your edits at the "zero crossing" to avoid pops and clicks when you move stuff around. And of course, work on backup copies in case you goof up.
 
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