The main thing I’m trying to do is down pitch a vocal sample a bit, and make sure that it stays in line with my tempo. When I try to use beatsync with a large vocal sample, the sample just becomes super sped up. Do I have to cut the sample into smaller parts to do this right? Or is there a different method that would work better for this other than beatsync?
Here’s a remix where someone does what I’m talking about:
if the acapella vocal sample isn’t pre-cut exactly on beat and/or fits within the max sync of 512 lines, or is already the same bpm as your track than it is a bunch of work, otherwise you could just slap on some pitchshifting effect and have it done that way.
You’ll have to find out at what bpm the sample is sung at, time-stretch it to your project tempo, with or without leaving the formants intact, maybe you can already achieve the desired pitching effect with external timestretch software? Than, if necessary, you could put in (non destructive) slice markers in renoises sample editor, and trigger trial and error program the vocals in line with your song in the sample editor.
I have run into the same thing with acapellas. As far as I know (and I am a noob so I may be wrong) but as there is no rhythm for the beatsync just pushes it to maximum pitch. So far my samples have been small enough to get away with tweaking the pitch but for longer samples it might time ok at the start and then slip out of alignment or time poorly to begin with and than align better later on (it depends on how it is trimmed). If I ran into that problem with longer samples I would use slice markers as Djeroek suggests. Manually slicing is another option but much more work.
My suggestion would be to cut the vocal sample in smaller chunks, let’s say you use a pattern length of 128, at 140 BPM and 8 LPB, then i would cut the sample exactly where the next pattern should start. Then the sample should be the exact lenght you want to hear within that pattern, now what you need to do is to either slice it or you try using the sxx command without slicing. I would probably try it without slices first and then write s00 at the first line, sfe on the last line, select the column and ctrl-i. Now it will usually sound a bit choppy, so i try to remove as many of the sxx commands i can without making it get out of rythm. You also have one extra step for the sxx command to work with, as it chops the sample up in 256 pieces and you have only 128 lines.
Yes, it’s some work, but it doesn’t really take that long when you get the hang of it.
Listening to your example, what i hear is that both pitch and tempo is changed. Maybe not relatively correct though, but you just wanted the pitch to change and not the tempo right?
Beatsync is mainly for percussive stuff and not so much for melodies and if you want it to be not so super sped up you would have to set the beatsync at a higher number, because what it does is to squeeze the whole sample lenght into the amount of lines you have set it to sync to.
