How do you sync you Outboard with DAW

[Justice]

As a good faith favor I have been dumping some stems from a local cat. He had no idea about MIDI or SMPTE or any type of time code.

I have found that a lot of PT and computer users do not rely on any type of Timecode.

Does anyone else see this as a major problem or is it just me.

I have seen PT engineers cut the front of the Two tracks, cut the vocals, guess the Tempo and roll. I guess if it works for you, great.

seems very crazy to me....

What are you all seeing or doing out there?

what if you want to sync up a drum machine or workstation. I dont understand. Making sure everything is in sync must be madding.

I guess protools has made it easy to guesstamate and if you work on it for hours you can get it just right.

I got a guy coming with his Triton to track out his track. which is cool but if he would have synced it correct the first time he wouldnt be waiting another two weeks to get back in my studio.... I got shit to do mane....

what every happened to being on point at the studio... you would have never caught me slippin like that on a speck deal project.

Stems with no tempo or sync info is wack!!!!!!!

Thats why I closed my studio to the public!

ok im done venting.

[JaeOne3345]

You aren't the only person.

The bottom line, a lot of folks are ignorant as hell when it comes to basic MIDI features/uses.

I've heard people on mpc-forums say that syncing is too difficult, so they just track in and line up the wave forms....riiiiiight

I do skratches for folks and I tell 'em straight out, make sure it's tracked and sync'd properly straight out, or I am not dealing with it.

Don't get me started on folks who send u stuff and say the bpm is 95.43875

"Are you serious?!"

Or people who use fine tuning for the purpose of making loops/samples (non percussive) fit the length of their pattern, etc, and then wonder why everything else is out of tune when they try to add more elements...

let me stop.. haha

[RyanC]

If possible I like to pull all the midi into PT. Then track it back one at a time. This way sync isn't an issue, I can fix all the dumb stuff on there, and easily swap sounds where needed.

+1 retuning samples is a pain.

[KevWest]

excuse my ignorance but why would an engineer need bpm info? I midi sync my beats when i track them from my hardware just to keep them in time without any extra work but I didn't think that just chopping to the first beat and moving everything else on beat was a bad thing

[Justice]

Originally Posted by xabiton

excuse my ignorance but why would an engineer need bpm info? I midi sync my beats when i track them from my hardware just to keep them in time without any extra work but I didn't think that just chopping to the first beat and moving everything else on beat was a bad thing

As long as you use MIDI it should be ok. They guy I was working work did the same kinda thing. drop a 8 bar loop and he expected me to cut and paste his shit.

First yes I am a engineer. I am a producer first so doing your job for you is very wack and green for me.

A professtional TO ME is someone who comes in with their music "tracked".

That means the full stem. with all your breaks or at least the entire song layed out.

Keep in mind this is just me, Im sure if the studio is charging you $25-$50 an hour they wont mind doing pre-production work at YOUR exspence.

My studio is always busy with ether my projects or me mixing someones stuff thats ready to be mix. Not produced.

If I do any editing or cutting or pasting in my studio I want co-production credits...

unless your paying my my full engineer rate which is $120 per hour. Then I will be your bitch.

Time is the business we are in and I dont have it to waste. I try to help but these kats these days need to learn more, and pay some more dues.

I hope the days of big studios come back. Or I might just close to the public all together.

[rickrock305]

Originally Posted by JaeOne3345

Don't get me started on folks who send u stuff and say the bpm is 95.43875

"Are you serious?!"

whats wrong with that? i set my tempo in pro tools like that. once you start copying and pasting stuff all over the place the precision really matters. if you just rounded that down to 95.4 then by the end of your song the tempo will be off.

plus how i find my tempo on preexisting materials is with the Time Compression/Expansion audiosuite plugin, and it gives results down to a few decimal places. so i figure if i have that kind of precision, why not use it. certainly doesn't hurt to be exact.


and as to the OP's question...i always sync drum machines with MTC. some people use the blank bar method with the click and then line up the click waveforms in pro tools. but MTC is quicker.