Hey guys,

Im about to mix a bunch of songs done by a singer friend of mine. He's a great friend, but terrible singer ( and he knows it ) and his rytmic timing is way off on almost every track. What would be the best way to adjust his rythmic timing in Cubase 8.5 pro ? I could edit each single part individually but that would be really long. Im new in Cubase pro so maybe im missing something.

Thanks in advance for your help!

VP

 

Just double click on the waveform, select audio warp, and click free warp, then just start clicking and dragging to fix the timing.

You could also try singing the part correctly yourself if you want then use some plugin like Synchro Arts Revoice Pro to synchronize your friends voice to yours; assuming you can sing better than him.

 

Haha...that is one big assumption ;) i do sing better than him. But thats a long process...ill go with the Audio Warp tool. Is this something like the Ableton Live Warp function? Where you just move the cursors arouns to match the groove you want? Im not in front of my computer right now, but ill check it out and see later on. Thanks for your input Covaloid!

 

If his timing is as bad as you say, warping might start to degrade the sound a bit. Cubase really good warping. Easily the best out of the three or four DAWs I've spent any serious time in, but IMO you can really only expect 100-500 milliseconds out of a warping algorithm before things start to fall apart.

I don't have a better solution for you though. Maybe fix what you can manually, bounce the audio, and then warp. The good news is that's easier in Cubase than other DAWs IMO because of slip editing. just make cuts around the section you want to move, hold ctrl+alt and your cursor becomes a little dot with arrows pointing left and right. You can move the audio inside the event so you don't have to fuck around with making space to move events.

 

You might give Melodyne a shot also, but personally, I would also suggest Revoice Pro as @covaloid suggested. If all you're after is fixing the timing, and not pitch repair, you don't have to sing it perfectly in pitch, just in time to align his track to that. Revoice will let you choose to correct pitch, timing, or both. I use this for lining up backing vocals, and it is the simplest solution I've used with the most transparent results IMHO.

 

Really, I have never experienced any software to do a better job than doing it manually. I have not tried revoice, tho.

 

@fraifikmushi, I suppose where Revoice really shines is the speed with which the audio is reworked. I can't say I really like the workflow as you have to put a plugin in the track to export the audio out to the Revoice standalone application, then import the processed audio back in.
As far as just moving a word/syllable back and forth in time, manual correction would work, but when you have to time stretch a word/syllable, Revoice excels at doing this in a natural way and it automagically syncs one vocal track to the other. You have to fiddle a little with the settings, and I've had to mark audio in the master track if it has words that aren't in the dub track, but other than that it's pretty simple to use.
For backing tracks, it just locks everything together nicely.
I'd work more in Melodyne if I knew how to split the blobs where I wanted them split and if the time bar aligned with my host application better. I suppose I need to watch a tutorial on it.