Craig Anderton
Member
In the pre-click track days, tempo changes were how songs "breathed." These changes were not random. A good drummer would deliberately speed up and slow down as appropriate. Often, there would also be a subtle, linear tempo increase over the course of a song. Many people consider Cylde Stubblefield, James Brown's drummer, as a "human metronome" yet his tempo varied considerably. However, because the tempo changes were always musically appropriate and done with extreme precision, the tempo always sounded "right" and super-tight.
Studio One is quite flexible with respect to tempo changes. However, you may notice some little artifacts or glitches due to the stretching. Surprisingly, there's a simple way to fix this. Simply click on the tempo track just before and just after where the glitch occurs. You don't have to change the tempo, just click on the tempo track. I don't know why this works. My theory is that adding more points "resets" the tempo reference, so the stretching works over a smaller range and doesn't have to work so hard at interpolating.
Also, note that you don't have to do tempo changes while tracking a song. It's often more convenient to record with a click track so there aren't any problems with tempo-synced effects following along (particularly time-based ones). However, prior to mastering you can import the final stereo mix into a song, and apply musically appropriate tempo changes.
Studio One is quite flexible with respect to tempo changes. However, you may notice some little artifacts or glitches due to the stretching. Surprisingly, there's a simple way to fix this. Simply click on the tempo track just before and just after where the glitch occurs. You don't have to change the tempo, just click on the tempo track. I don't know why this works. My theory is that adding more points "resets" the tempo reference, so the stretching works over a smaller range and doesn't have to work so hard at interpolating.
Also, note that you don't have to do tempo changes while tracking a song. It's often more convenient to record with a click track so there aren't any problems with tempo-synced effects following along (particularly time-based ones). However, prior to mastering you can import the final stereo mix into a song, and apply musically appropriate tempo changes.