Quick tip: automatic elastic tempo

A short while ago I read Andy Jackson’s tip on Earshot about finding the tempo of a song.

As an alternative, you could use the manual method 🙂 For example, tap “Tempo” in the tempo section of Pro Tools or, alternatively, use the “Tap for beats per minute” tool of this website.

But this Quick Tip is not about finding a song tempo. Instead, we will change the tempo of a song to the session tempo, almost automatically.

Problem

For Mash-ups, beatmixes and other rhythm-based production it’s necessary to change the tempo of songs. Set a session tempo and then speed slower songs up or bring faster songs down to match it.

One common method is to cut a song in to 4 bars, stretch it with the TCE Trimmer to 4 bars of the grid (Session Tempo) and bring the length of the song back again. It works, no question. But… you can skip that.

Solution

In this example I want to change the tempo of the song “Raging” by Kygo (100bpm) to the session tempo (125 bpm).

At first, change your track to “Tick based”. That means, change the “little blue clock” to the “little green metronome”, next to the elastic audio section.

Now you have got more possibilities to work with. Do a right click on your song and select “Elastic properties“.

At the moment in the “Source Tempo” section there is a tempo of 125 bpm (Session tempo).

Change this to the original tempo of your song (in this case it’s 100bpm). Look what you’ve done: the beats fit to the grid and the tempo of the song is now the same as thesession tempo.

Did you know?

With Elastic Properties you can stretch beats and music to halfspeed or double.

Just click the buttons…

Have fun with elastic tempo changes!

See all Christian’s Quick Tips.

Get them in German on Christian’s personal blog.