Hi,
I was hoping someone could tell me of a way to use Ardour to help me trancribe jazz solos by slowing down a clip. This needs to be done without changing the pitch and needs to be done real time non-destructively (I saw that there is a tempo adjusting tool but it has to process and rewrite the hole file first to take effect).
If you load your file into Audacity there is an effect of that nature. I think it’s just listed as Tempo in the effects menu. And you can preserve the pitch. I’m not sure about real time and you do have to process the file but I would just save it with a new name or don’t save it at all and just use it within Audacity.
A plugin to do this would need to allocate memory on the fly as the plugin wouldn’t really be aware of how long the sample is and needs to store the input until it is to be played later. I suppose its possible, but not very practical. I have done transcribing (Rosolino solos) with audacity. Its a more appropriate tool for this. You can’t change how much it slows it down on the fly, but I usually make a 1/2 tempo and 3/4 tempo version and between them can figure it out.
I use ardour for this purpose. I select a region or part of region and make a region to region list. Then I create a few new tracks where I drop the difficult solo I need to learn. I stretch each region different while preserving pitch.
I solo the most stretched one and start practice or analyze and then move towards the original in stretched track.
Excelent idea.
Can I ask how you import the audio to ardour? I guess the obvious thing would be just to import the mp3 but it is not supported.
Just curious if there is sth easy I didn’t think about.
You can decode it to .wav first. various tools are available to do so. I’d use ffmpeg -i file.mp3 file.wav.
Another option is to treat it as “video” file in Ardour (assuming you have ardour’s video-tools installed) Session > Open Video > … extract audio only; can import mp3s, too.
Sonic visualiser has an awesome melodic spectrogram where you can almost see the notes that are played.
Load mp3, press M.
Hover mouse over spectrogram to show the pitch. Depends on the file loaded how well this works. It can be a bit fuzzy.
It also loads ladspa plugins and sometimes with the karaoke plugin you can hear things that are in the background a bit better.
Use the qm vamp plugins to detect beats / bars. Use those to set loops, etc etc.
It really is an awesome tool.