Today I had to remind myself that I am actually kind of decent at math. I was looking to figure out what the hell tempo the song "B.O.B. and V.I.N.CENT." plays at, but there's nothing to suggest a beat by any means. SO! I literally had to reverse engineer the tempo via this method that I'm about to (try to) give cliff notes for.
Open Audacity. Make sure your monitor thing down at the bottom is set to "hh:mm:ss + milliseconds" and the drop-down just above set to "Length and End of Selection".
Pick an instrument to monitor, preferably the lead or other such stand-out instrument. Then, use the Select tool to encapsulate your first note; basically drag the selection's start and end points to where the entirety of the current note (or rest!!) is contained. Write down the length of your selection (say for example, "00:00:01.896") somewhere, like a word document. You're going to want to do this for at least eight notes, plus any rests in between (because as we all know, negative space is just as important).
Open up FL Studio (as if you didn't have it open already, pshaw pshaw pshaw) and Calculator. This is the part where my painstaken figures come in.
For your first note's length, put in the value you wrote in Word/Notepad. ((0 --> 1.896)) Multiply it by 4. ((1.896 * 4 = 7.584))
Open another Calculator. Take your answer's decimal value ((in this case, 0.584)) and multiply it by 24. ((0.584 --> 14.016, simplified to 14, or in other words, for other numbers, you will need to round up/down in the case of a final decimal like 7.312.))
In FL, open your piano roll. Turn the Snap-To Grid off. This is because you're going to now place a note that, according to FL, is "000:07:014" long, about 15 blocks long on the roll and a little bit less than two beats. The reason I had you convert that decimal using 24 is because FL operates on ticks as its base system instead of milliseconds. Speaking of which, make sure you've got your BPM (temporarily) set to 60. The reason why doesn't really make sense in retrospect, but it's better than, say, 120, because you're operating on the base 24, and you'll be able to operate as precisely as possible.
For all future notes, use your lack of Snap-To grid to make sure they touch up against one another.
When you think you've got a sufficient number of notes recorded in the 'roll, use Ctrl+A. Then, hold the shift key, and drag one of your notes to the right. This will cause the entirety of your note lengths to (potentially) be multiplied by whatever percentage. Once you're dragged out to something that looks as sensible as it could likely get, go ahead and turn your Snap-To Grid back on (1/6 is recommended, as songs like the one I had to create this system for use triplets, which only 1/6 Step is capable of producing without you having to use that percentage trick I just taught you).
From here, you're going to want to start your guesswork with tempo. Because the kind of tune you'll be using this system for is likely going to be orchestral and probably downtempo, you'll want to probably guess around anywhere between 50 and 110. In my case, the final tempo ended up being 98.
After that's done, you'll want to make sure everything's nice and tidy within your piano roll. Using your Snap-To Grid, press Ctrl+Q to quantize everything, then go through and edit things, using your original file as reference, adjusting note positions, lengths, and your tempo as needed, until it's as accurate to the original file as you're satisfied with.
Now that this is all figured out, programming in the rest of the song will be miles easier, since you have a frame of reference for scaling everything else at present. Hooray!
As you can see, after stretching it out and everything I was even able to add the ninth note without going through this same rigmarole yet again. Major time saver, glad I spent two-ish hours working through it. I'm sure some fucker online's done this already, but A) hell if I know the keywords to use for that shit, and B) even if I found it, I'd probably retain the information for all of three days because I almost always have to learn by doing.
I've added a ghost note in the other channel I have at the moment, in the same exact position for both patterns, to help show the difference.
To be honest, I wasn't 100% sure about it being in 3/4, but there are three "arcs" in the song that follow more or less the same structure.
Open Audacity. Make sure your monitor thing down at the bottom is set to "hh:mm:ss + milliseconds" and the drop-down just above set to "Length and End of Selection".
Pick an instrument to monitor, preferably the lead or other such stand-out instrument. Then, use the Select tool to encapsulate your first note; basically drag the selection's start and end points to where the entirety of the current note (or rest!!) is contained. Write down the length of your selection (say for example, "00:00:01.896") somewhere, like a word document. You're going to want to do this for at least eight notes, plus any rests in between (because as we all know, negative space is just as important).
Open up FL Studio (as if you didn't have it open already, pshaw pshaw pshaw) and Calculator. This is the part where my painstaken figures come in.
For your first note's length, put in the value you wrote in Word/Notepad. ((0 --> 1.896)) Multiply it by 4. ((1.896 * 4 = 7.584))
Open another Calculator. Take your answer's decimal value ((in this case, 0.584)) and multiply it by 24. ((0.584 --> 14.016, simplified to 14, or in other words, for other numbers, you will need to round up/down in the case of a final decimal like 7.312.))
In FL, open your piano roll. Turn the Snap-To Grid off. This is because you're going to now place a note that, according to FL, is "000:07:014" long, about 15 blocks long on the roll and a little bit less than two beats. The reason I had you convert that decimal using 24 is because FL operates on ticks as its base system instead of milliseconds. Speaking of which, make sure you've got your BPM (temporarily) set to 60. The reason why doesn't really make sense in retrospect, but it's better than, say, 120, because you're operating on the base 24, and you'll be able to operate as precisely as possible.
For all future notes, use your lack of Snap-To grid to make sure they touch up against one another.
When you think you've got a sufficient number of notes recorded in the 'roll, use Ctrl+A. Then, hold the shift key, and drag one of your notes to the right. This will cause the entirety of your note lengths to (potentially) be multiplied by whatever percentage. Once you're dragged out to something that looks as sensible as it could likely get, go ahead and turn your Snap-To Grid back on (1/6 is recommended, as songs like the one I had to create this system for use triplets, which only 1/6 Step is capable of producing without you having to use that percentage trick I just taught you).
From here, you're going to want to start your guesswork with tempo. Because the kind of tune you'll be using this system for is likely going to be orchestral and probably downtempo, you'll want to probably guess around anywhere between 50 and 110. In my case, the final tempo ended up being 98.
After that's done, you'll want to make sure everything's nice and tidy within your piano roll. Using your Snap-To Grid, press Ctrl+Q to quantize everything, then go through and edit things, using your original file as reference, adjusting note positions, lengths, and your tempo as needed, until it's as accurate to the original file as you're satisfied with.
Now that this is all figured out, programming in the rest of the song will be miles easier, since you have a frame of reference for scaling everything else at present. Hooray!
As you can see, after stretching it out and everything I was even able to add the ninth note without going through this same rigmarole yet again. Major time saver, glad I spent two-ish hours working through it. I'm sure some fucker online's done this already, but A) hell if I know the keywords to use for that shit, and B) even if I found it, I'd probably retain the information for all of three days because I almost always have to learn by doing.
I've added a ghost note in the other channel I have at the moment, in the same exact position for both patterns, to help show the difference.
To be honest, I wasn't 100% sure about it being in 3/4, but there are three "arcs" in the song that follow more or less the same structure.