Correcting for Tape Varispeed

[5andFretless]

I'm not sure this is the right sub forum, so if it belongs somewhere else...

50 years ago me, my brother, and 2 other school friends formed a garage band and wrote some original music. We were all preteen at the time and just learning our instruments. We ended up with 2 songs that we felt were top 40 material so we all worked our asses off one summer to make some money, rented some studio time (the guy gave us a big break) and recorded the songs. The next summer we saved enough money to have the 500 45's pressed and off we went to sell them at the local music stores. That went as expected.

Recently I was going through some boxes that I brought home after cleaning out mom's house after she died. In one of the boxes was a couple of copies of that 45. I dug out the turn table and played it, ripping both sides to mp3 format.

Here is the question - The songs are not as bad as I remember, actually not bad at all considering our ages and experience. The problem is there was no click track and the drummer (my brother) was all over the place. Is there software that can correct the tempo without altering the pitch?

 

[MonetBass]

Most DAW software has the ability to stretch/shrink audio without altering pitch. But in order to correct the multiple variations, you'll have to break the audio up depending on if you need to speed it up or slow it down. You can set the preferred tempo in the song and go from there. Good luck!

 

[silky smoove]

I’m primarily a Logic user and would do this by enabling the Flex editor, setting the mode to ‘FlexTime Polyphonic’ and would go through the audio region in the DAW and place flex markers at key points to push and pull the timing around to account for timing inconsistencies. It wouldn’t sound perfect and depending on the amount of adjustment needed it may sound better as-is. Doing it meticulously by hand and allowing a little tempo drift will result in a more natural feel than doing it algorithmically to some predetermined static tempo.

 

[Basslice]

+1. I have sometimes tried to "fix" things that were recorded with natural variable timing. It is a lot of work and the results don't sound at all right, even though every beat is technically with the click track. Killed all the life and swing of the performance. But yes, you can change timing in most DAWs without changing pitch.

 

[rudy4444]

I'm not sure this is the right sub forum, so if it belongs somewhere else...

50 years ago me, my brother, and 2 other school friends formed a garage band and wrote some original music. We were all preteen at the time and just learning our instruments. We ended up with 2 songs that we felt were top 40 material so we all worked our asses off one summer to make some money, rented some studio time (the guy gave us a big break) and recorded the songs. The next summer we saved enough money to have the 500 45's pressed and off we went to sell them at the local music stores. That went as expected.

Recently I was going through some boxes that I brought home after cleaning out mom's house after she died. In one of the boxes was a couple of copies of that 45. I dug out the turn table and played it, ripping both sides to mp3 format.

Here is the question - The songs are not as bad as I remember, actually not bad at all considering our ages and experience. The problem is there was no click track and the drummer (my brother) was all over the place. Is there software that can correct the tempo without altering the pitch?

You can adjust tempo within pretty much any DAW and many of them provide an easy way to automate the tempo throughout the song as it plays.

Here's a quick tutorial of automating pitch in Reaper:

 

[seamonkey]

Ableton has BeatSeeker tempo tracker. Newer Ableton has some stuff built in that does this now.

But instead you can play the mp3 back and create another tempo track by tapping a block. i.e. make a click track but to the varying tempo of the song by you taping it in.
You then have a tempo map of the whole song. You can keep the tempo variable and use this to sync up new tracks.
Or You can use the tempo map and to quantize music tracks to a synced tempo.
Either way it will maintain the pitch.
Go listen to some old songs and you'll find many wander around on tempo, yet people sample them all the time to use them in new songs. (with permission)

Also check out Band In a Box, it has an audio chord wizard, AWS, that will write out the chords. You do a similar steps of taping in then tempo so it knows where the bars are. It will figure out what's going usually after a few bars of tap tempo. After BIAB figures out the chords you can add more tracks, or print out the chords if you forgot them.

 

[Aloe]

don't use mp3 for audio meant to be edited. re-rip them in wav/flac for better results.

 

[DirkP]

I'm pretty sure the results will sound peculiar. If the entire songs would have been played too fast or too slow, maybe. But if the tempo is all over the place the "corrected" version might sound even stranger than the original one.