Its driving me nuts is there a trick to it?

I want to add to these cdlc libraries but i cant seem to figure this out... UGH 

@ What seems to be the issue exactly? Are you using a tab someone else made or are you adding notes into eof? There's not really a trick, but things you need to know for making customs that will really make things easier on you. I would suggest watching this video http://customsforge.com/topic/8428-new-how-to-create-rocksmith-2014-customs-video/

Really pay attention to what he does around 5:30 after he imports the gpro file. He's moving the beat markers and that is what you will always want to do to move the notes. It's best to always set the 1st beat marker before you move any others. However, if you're using a tab where the timing of the notes are incorrect then you'll have an issue with syncing notes.

What @@rummhamm87 mentioned above is a good place to start. My general way to sync tabs is:

 

1) Once the song is imported into EoF, add leading silence so that no notes are played until ~4 seconds or so.

2) Import GP file with time signature, but not text and sectioning. I tend to start with bass for syncing since the lack of chords and other sources of busy-ness makes it much easier to read the Waveform and spectrogram.

3) Line up the first note of the tab with the first note in the audio, using either waveform or spectrogram.

4) Input tempo of GP file into EOF. If it looks way off, try to at least get it within a couple of bpm of the predominant tempo so you don't have to adjust each and every beat marker.

5) Then go through the tab and make sure each beat is aligned (much more on this below) with the appropriate part of the song. Usually if I notice a small drift I'll just correct it after a few measures, then check that the intermediate points are where they should be.

6) Once this is done I'll start mucking around with changes to the tabs and all that other stuff.

 

For step 5, aligning the beats, there are a few tricks that I've picked up from other people and through the CDLC's that I've made.

i) Claps/metronome, waveform graph, and spectrogram can all be useful for syncing. I personally find the spectrogram the most useful now, though it's also the hardest to understand. In the spectrogram, time increases to the right, pitch increases as you go up the screen, and intensity (how loud that pitch is in the file) increases as you get more to the red side of the color spectrum. What does this mean? At beats, there will often be sharp vertical lines of increased intensity due to drums and bass. The kick drum can also show up as the very lowest block being dark red. These should very clearly and precisely point out where most of the key beats are in the song.

ii) Zooming in a bit tends to yield better results as it's easier to make your click and drag more precise. Things start to get disorienting at 1/3 and 1/2 zoom, but I've found 1/4 zoom works really well for syncing.

iii) If there is a time signature change from x/4 to x/8 (or x/16, I guess. I do a good amount of prog) or vice versa, clicking and dragging usually does something weird to the time signatures in EoF, and it doesn't turn out how you expect it to. If there's a switch from (say) 4/4 to 7/8 time, I'll find a previous aligned marker in 4/4, then manually adjust the bpm there until the start of the 7/8 measure is where I want it. This is not a problem for switches from 2/4 to 4/4 or the like.

 

I hope this is helpful! I can try to get some pictures in spectrogram mode to help with visualizing it if my text description above isn't very clear.

 

I hope this is helpful! I can try to get some pictures in spectrogram mode to help with visualizing it if my text description above isn't very clear.

 

Thanks! Tomorrow I will fire up EoF and see if I can figure out what you just explained. 

Pictures would probably be most helpful.

Hopefully you are not syncing notes and instead meant beat markers in your title, as this is a poor way to chart a custom.

 

I wasn't going to share this because I'm just a beginning charter myself, but another member of this forum is also just starting his first custom, so I made this for him. I'm sure I've left some important info out. And this only applies to the song he is working on. Hope it helps somewhat.

 

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/95nud6hkkzix82g/Beat%20Marker%20Syncing.pptx?dl=0

Try looking into something like Sonic Visualizer. It will lay out the beats per minute, and if the tab is correct, it should line up pretty well. If there isn't something that lines up, I just go to the TuxGuitar application, and make the proper edit. Everything then should be pretty clean and synced pretty well. Honestly, it's all really based on how well you set up your bpms.

OK, so here are some screenshots showing how the Spectrogram feature can be used for syncing. This is doing the song "Bitch" by The Rolling Stones (which I may do pretty soon provided the tabs aren't crap). I hadn't yet imported from the GP as I can be pretty confident the song's going to be in 4/4 for everything I'm looking at here. As I said before, the vertical position of the boxes represents their frequency range, while redder colored boxes represent more intensity in that frequency range.

 

http://i.imgur.com/tXNX3ln.png

For this image I've just aligned the start while keeping the default BPM of 120. You can see nice clean vertical lines to the left of the second and third beat marker. For some of the later markers it's a bit unclear just looking at them without the context of the rest whether they should be synced to the left or right lines, which is part of the reason why it's good to set a reasonably accurate tempo (i.e. so you don't get in situations where syncing well isn't obvious).

 

http://i.imgur.com/Lg9dd8v.png

In this image I just set the tempo to 134. Since all of the beat markers are on the first or straddling the first and second blocks of time on the beat, this looks pretty good for the song.

 

http://i.imgur.com/XIcSLLm.png

A little later into the song, it's clear that this tempo isn't working so well - it looks like the tempo is a bit faster than the BPM I have set, as the beats are getting further and further to the left of the corresponding beat markers (this is pretty common in the other Stones songs I've looked at - they take a little bit of time to build up to the actual tempo of the song). So here I want to i) get this section synced, and ii) get a good bpm for the rest of the song.

 

http://i.imgur.com/dMqghY3.png

I've now more or less synced this section (I might move a marker or two slightly over). The beat markers all fall on the high intensity vertical lines corresponding with the beats in the music, and it looks like the tempo is about 137, so I'll use that going forward (side note: the GP files I could find for this song have the bpm being 138 or 142. They're usually somewhat near the neighborhood, but they're almost never spot on).

 

I think that's about it (though I should have done this with at least the time signature from the song imported). For some types of music and production the beats don't always look quite so clean (this is especially common in metal), but I've found it much easier to identify certain features (especially in the lower frequencies, which tend to correspond closely with beats) in the spectrogram rather than the waveform.

Edited July 16, 201510 yr by albatross213

Having the same thing with Half the world away by Noel G, It has a verying tempo, I think it was recorded in one take and it is a bit loose tempo wise, you can beat match to the drums half way through but it will not hold throughout the song, also the gp-tab is way off, it has the meat and gravy but needs well adjusting, Eof is not the easiest editor to use, so fuckit, back to the grind stone note for note, I wish Eof was like Soundforge but with better beat matching.

You'll get better with practice. Syncing beat markers instead of notes is the only method experienced note trackers for any rhythm game will recommend though.

Having the same thing with Half the world away by Noel G, It has a verying tempo, I think it was recorded in one take and it is a bit loose tempo wise, you can beat match to the drums half way through but it will not hold throughout the song, also the gp-tab is way off, it has the meat and gravy but needs well adjusting, Eof is not the easiest editor to use, so fuckit, back to the grind stone note for note, I wish Eof was like Soundforge but with better beat matching.

When I said in my post above "I'll use 137 [bpm] going forward" I mean that I'll be using that as a base so that I don't have to adjust every single beat marker in the song to get them in the right place. The tempo still varies throughout the rest of the song I used as an example (usually between about 135 and 138), so I still need to adjust beat markers past where I showed in the images, but I can't really show that except in a video. If people would like a video of me syncing a song from scratch, describing what I'm doing, and so on, I can do that, but there will probably be some boring stretches.

 

And as @@raynebc said, you don't want to go about moving individual notes unless there's actually something going on that's not on rhythm (something like playing consistently lagging behind the beat or something like that). It happens in some genres of music but it's probably not something you'll have to deal with much.

 

And if I have to change notes and stuff I usually make my changes to the GP file. There are some things that are easier in EoF, but I find most things easier in GP.

I have been trying to create CDLCs too, but gave up. Much too tedious. I am comfortable letting others do it, although there are loads of songs that I would love but are not available. I sacrifice them to just play what others make and donate to keep the servers up. I'm comfortable with that. I wish it wasn't so difficult though.