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?

Gosh, Morry. I think your suggestions are the best route to go. Does anyone else have any other ideas that may help?

Yeah, I'm a cautionary tale. "All you kids out in TV land, let this sad story always remind you: beatmap FIRST." I think I'll just copy the entire project, then go through with the beat mapping and see what I get. My first instinct was to record the guitar, give him a half-hour break and beat map it, then go ahead and lay down the vocals. But I veered from that plan, and now I've created about 2x as much work for myself. Maybe 3x. Sigh.

Hindsight is always a ..... you know. Enjoy the editing.

Can I use the "protect track" option to my advantage here? I've never used it before, and I thought it was mainly for midi tracks. But does it have any effect on audio tracks?

eh. Wasn't so bad. Merged all the little vocal regions into one for each track, then moved anchor points, then beatmapped. As expected, the vocal parts went wandering, but snapped back into place pretty easily and all is good.