Copy and paste ?

[Bugatti]

Hi
I’m new to the DP24 and this site. Although I’ve done lots of recording over the years, someone else has done the engineering and I’ve just done the playing.

Like many, I’ve found the manual ‘challenging’ and Phil Tipping’s expert technical help (schematic diagrams etc) goes way over my head too.

Question: I’ve put down a backing track with vocals over 11 tracks. I’d like to copy its chorus so I can paste it in at various points during the song.

I just need to know what buttons I need to press to ‘copy and paste’ these 11 tracks of music over - in very simple terms! I’m a muso not a techie!

Thanks in advance !

 

[Phil Tipping]

Welcome to the forum. Sorry about the videos - there's always the step-by-step guide

To copy & paste you need to tell the machine 3 time values. The first 2 define the start and end points of the slice you want to copy (the 'source'). You set these by setting the IN and OUT points. Their values are shown on the home screen. I guess you're ok with how to set these.

The 3rd value is the start point for the paste operation (the 'target'). This is called the TO point, and is defined by the current location of the transport. It's shown at the top of the home screen. You set this by winding or rewinding the transport as required. You can use markers to help with this.

So set these 3 values, then press Track Edit and scroll down to the editing function you want.

The pictures on the Track Edit screen (and in the manual) give a sense of how they work... the copy/paste function overwrites the target with the source slice, whereas the copy/insert function will open up a gap in the target and copy the source slice into the gap. If you've already allowed for the chorus in your song, copy/paste should be ok.

You can then set the source and target track numbers (they can be different). If you scroll to end of the track numbers, you'll see an 'all' value. This will edit all tracks in one operation.

 

[Rupert]

Hi ,same to me ,I`m just beginning and many things seem to be locgc and well explained in the manual (for me the german version ,which really is very well translated!)
I have a question on editing in general:
I did find (as described above) the possibility to edit one Track or all tracks at the same time,
But is it not possible to assign a various number of tracks (for example 1.3.5,6,7) to edit in one operation? Then it would be much easier (for example to add "silence" to parts of tracks with noise but no musical content) to edtit songs . I´m used to this possibility by my 25 years old Roland hard-disk-recorder...
Thanks a lot and bests !

 

[Phil Tipping]

Welcome to the forum Rupert. As far as I know, there is no way to select a subset of tracks for editing this way. The time parameters are preserved though, so it's not too difficult to repeat the operation on each track separately, especially if you change the track number using the track Select button instead of the jog wheel. You could always send your suggestion/request to Tascam; there's no harm in asking, and as my wife says: 'if you don't ask, you don't get'

 

[Rupert]

Thanks Phil!
could you tell me , to which adress I can send suggestion/request?
Thanks again ,and bests to your wife!

 

[Phil Tipping]

Just search for Tascam support; there's a European one here.

 

[Bugatti]

Welcome to the forum. Sorry about the videos - there's always the step-by-step guide

To copy & paste you need to tell the machine 3 time values. The first 2 define the start and end points of the slice you want to copy (the 'source'). You set these by setting the IN and OUT points. Their values are shown on the home screen. I guess you're ok with how to set these.

The 3rd value is the start point for the paste operation (the 'target'). This is called the TO point, and is defined by the current location of the transport. It's shown at the top of the home screen. You set this by winding or rewinding the transport as required. You can use markers to help with this.

So set these 3 values, then press Track Edit and scroll down to the editing function you want.

The pictures on the Track Edit screen (and in the manual) give a sense of how they work... the copy/paste function overwrites the target with the source slice, whereas the copy/insert function will open up a gap in the target and copy the source slice into the gap. If you've already allowed for the chorus in your song, copy/paste should be ok.

You can then set the source and target track numbers (they can be different). If you scroll to end of the track numbers, you'll see an 'all' value. This will edit all tracks in one operation.

 

[Bugatti]

Hi again Phil !

Thanks for your speedy reply. Yes, it’s taken this long and lots of trial and error, before I finally managed to copy and paste. I made sure to use a discarded song though, just in case and am glad I did!

I took care to set the ‘copy’ track positions precisely, and toggled to the exact ‘paste to’ destination on the home screen. However, when I played back, the pasted tracks came in a little later than required.

I’m 100% certain that all my ‘numbers’ were correct, so why did my ‘paste’ come in late and how can I resolve it?

As I’ve said, I used a discarded song in this case, so it didn’t matter when I didn’t achieve the desired result. However, is there a way to undo an incorrect ‘paste’ and restore back to how it was?

Thanks!

 

[Phil Tipping]

Undoing is as simple as pressing... Undo
It's almost instantaneous, as is the actual copy/paste, so it's really easy to retry the operation with slightly different timings if you don't get it right first time. The TimeLine display option in the home screen may be useful.
As to why your edit wasn't precise enough, it depends how you are setting the times in the first place. The machine can be positioned with an accuracy of 3.3ms but there are several ways of setting and marking positions so a full reply would be quite lengthy... but they are all listed in the step-by-step guide (section 41: "How to position the transport" and section 54: "How to scroll the transport to a precise point").

 

[Bugatti]

Thanks (yet!) again Phil
I’ve followed your advice (cut and paste) and knocked the ‘to’ track back by 6ms and it worked first time!

Subsequently I haven’t been nearly as successful, but I imagine that practice makes perfect.

As for the undo/redo button - I still can’t fathom it out. I press it and it lights up and stays lit. Then I eventually ‘release’ it, review the track and nothing appears to have been undone. Am I missing something? Maybe the undo button only refers to certain procedures but not others.

For instance, if I mistakenly recorded a vocal over say, a vital keyboard track, would pressing the undo/redo button remove the vocal and reinstate that vital keyboard track?

(I always read the relevant bits of the manual and checking out the ‘net for answers before bothering you yet again!)

 

[Phil Tipping]

No worries; glad you're getting the hang of it
The Undo light is meant to stay on. It indicates that you can still 'undo the undo' if you change your mind.
The whole undo mechanism is not intuitive regarding the light and operation. Normally you can only undo one thing, but there's an option in Preferences which allows you to go back to any of 9 previous states, and yes you guessed, the light and button behave completely differently in this mode.
If you'll forgive another shameless plug this is all in the step-by-step guide : Section 64: "How to undo (with history levels set to 1)" and section 65: "How to undo (with history levels set to 10)", along with a detailed 3-page explanation with screenshots in the Terminology section 3.57: "Undo/Redo".