Beatmapping: Is there a better way?
Apr 14th, 2012, 06:41
I have a client who is a great singer, and creative songwriter, but not a classically trained musician, and has a terrible time playing/singing to a click. We ended up just dispensing with the click all together, and I was going to beat-map to his basic guitar track, then go back and record.
And then I thought, well, won't complicate matters too much if we just put the lead vocal down. And then we got real creative and added all these little "spot harmonies" over certain words or short phrases, and we were having so much fun I sort of forgot about the beat mapping all together.
And now I'm kind of f**ked, as I just realized that all those little harmonies are going to shift all over the place when I start to add tempo markers through beat mapping. In addition to adding other instruments to the arrangement, I want to use Melodyne to further thicken some of the chords we created, and Melodyne needs to have the tempo information (at least I think it does...am I wrong?)
So here's what I think I have to do:
1. change all the anchor points in every region in the arrangement so that they mark exactly the beginnings of the regions.
2. beat map to the original guitar part.
3. go back in and manually shift all the little regions into place on the newly created grid.
But...I'm afraid if I do this, I might lose some of the loose easy laid-back character of the song. Is there a better way?