Out of Practice

Well, that was a frustrating learning experience.

Julie is going to sing "Juicy Details" in the talent show at school next week. She's been practicing against the guitar track that I recorded, but it's really a lousy karaoke track, because there's no strong indicator of when to come in at the beginning of the verses and choruses. Now, I've got all of the original tracks, so this should be easy to fix if I can just record some sort of audio signal that she can hear that's not overly obtrusive.

And I realize that I have Groove Agent SE in my Cubase arsenal and that it has a pad that is a hand clap. Cool! A pair of hand claps inserted at the right locations should fix all things. All I have to do is record an audio track of the output from Groove Agent.

After much swearing and use of Google-fu, I discover that in order to do this, you must:

Create a rack instrument with Groove Agent, not an instrument track.

Then you have to create a stereo Group track.

Then you can assign the output of Groove Agent to the stereo Group track.

Now, create a stereo Audio track.

Assign the Group track as the input for the stereo Audio track.

Enable recording on the Audio track.

Remember to push the record button.

Hit the hand clap pad in Groove Agent to provide the cue for your daughter.

Having done all this, we brought Julie downstairs to listen to it.

And she didn't like it.

So we are using the track with no cues other than the rhythm of the guitar. I also had to trim out a repeat of the chorus at the end for time, which I did in WaveLab (eventually). The "eventually" part is because I haven't had to do audio trimming in WaveLab in a couple of versions now and the controls are just a little different than they used to be.

But I figured it out.

*sigh*