Just Add Piano...

A friend of mine in Detroit fired me off a quick .mp3 of a new tune her and her wife had written for a friend's ordination. It was a quick take - vocals, guitar and shaker egg.

For fun, I thought I'd throw down a piano track and mix it with the original take. I decided to use HalionOne's included Yamaha S90ES piano patch, since I don't have my Bosendorfer 290 yet. The signal from this patch is quite dry, so you add reverb to taste as an insert (which I prefer).

There are three hazards in recording over someone else's audio mix.

1) You muddy it. If there's a lot already going on in the tune, more is usually not better. Fortunately, this mix was sparsely done, and the vocals were forward enough that adding another instrument could be done without nuking them.

2) Pitch. They might be tuned to something other than A440. You might need to adjust the pitch of the source track. Hopefully this isn't much of a shift and doesn't wonk up the tone too much. Again, not a problem in this case - bang on concert tuning.

2) Rhythm. An imported audio file doesn't have a natural alignment with the bars and beats in Cubase, so you can't just turn on a click track easily. A pox on folks who don't hold to a beat reasonably firmly, or have long sustained sections without any evident count or cue as to when to come back in.

This particular tune featured a reasonably rhythmic and percussive guitar patch in standard 4/4 time so keeping track of the beat wasn't too tough. The guitar did have several key rhythmic figures that needed to be tight with the piano for the tune to hold together. I wanted to tighten up the hits on a couple of these figures.

I can't use the bar/beat markers as a reference (they aren't aligned to the audio material). What I did instead was use the graphical view of the audio (Sample editor) in one window, the Midi editor on the piano in the other window, both zoomed in. I would then move the current time (vertical line) to the start of the audio hit in the sample editor, which also moved the line in the midi editor.

It was then easy to drag the note starts to the start of the hit and tighten up the timing on those key bits.