Syncing two tracks in cs5.5

Question

Hello,
I have two tracks of a piano concerto (solo and orchestral accompaniment).  I would like to "morph" the orchestral accompaniment track (change the tempo on a bar/phrase by bar/phrase basis) to match the solo track. Since it is classical music, it doesn't have the trong stransients of a drum beat.
What is the best way to accomplish this in Audition CS 5.5?
I am new to audio editing. Can someone point me to a "step-by-step tutorial" of how to accomplish this over a short sequence (obviously I would repeat the steps many times over a whole movement).
Thank you very much for any help.

Answer 1

Hmm... more questions first, I'm afraid...
When you say you 'recorded' the piano solo, did you actually play it in or program it? And how accurately timed is it against the orchestral recording?
Given a free choice, I'd start with an audio recording of the piano, cut it up into segments and place these appropriately against the orchestral background. Specifically in this instance, you'll have an electronic piano sound that won't have anything like the ambience that the orchestral recording will have (even if it's been electronically generated, they're almost bound to have added something to it). If you start mucking around with the orchestral recording, you're going to alter that, and the results probably won't sound very convincing at all. You can fake the acoustic on your final piano track though, to make it sound at least something like the orchestral track, and because it won't have been stretched if you do it last, you are far less likely to notice what's happened.
So as far as I'm concerned the process may well go something like this: (Sorry that this is rather long-winded, but I can't see an easier way to explain it to a self-confessed beginner)
Place the orchestral accompaniment on track one, and put a rendered audio version of the piano on track two. You will need to split this into individual chunks that you can work on, but first you need to understand how this works. You're probably going to get a few system messages saying words to the effect of 'this track is in use in your multitrack session, and what you're doing may screw up other things', but you can ignore those, as long as you start at the beginning and work forward, and don't redo any of the timing changes.
What happens with any file in Multitrack View is that it's not actually cut up at all, but selectively played in a non-destructive manner. In English, this means that there's just one file, but different bits of it can be started at different points (or even repeated), and you can do this in a very flexible manner. So apparently 'editing' the file in MV isn't really doing anything physical to it at all - just altering the way the file's played.
But, with your piano we may well need to lengthen bits of it (or even shorten them). And unfortunately, the only way to do this in CS5.5 is to open the file in Edit View (just double-click on it), select the bit you need to change by highlighting it, and using the Stretch and Pitch effect. If you use the iZotope Radius setting, you'll keep the best quality, but you're going to need to be very careful about how much alteration you do. Fortunately you can fine-tune this pretty accurately, although how small the segments will need to be rather depends upon how well you 'played' this. After doing some of this, you'll need to save the file you've been stretching in EV, and that, unfortunately, is a destructive process (ie not a replay-only thing, but a permanent change to the file). But that's why you have to move forward and not go back; going back and altering something will make a timing difference to everything you did afterwards. You may have to think about that for a while, but I'm sure you'll get it in the end!
I suppose that one way around this - and probably what I'd do - would be to make a number of smaller files of the piano part, and insert them separately. This way you get more options about changing things easily, because the changes will only alter small parts of what you're doing rather than the whole thing. Putting 'splits' in the files in multitrack is easy - there's a right-click option that will put a split at the cursor point in any highlighted file, and when you've done that you can move them apart by dragging them with the mouse. And it's this operation that you're going to have to get used to, because that's how you get the individual bits of file in the correct place WRT the orchestral file.
With the possible exception of the stretching part, this is actually easier to do than to describe. But anyway, that's the gist of it. Do some experiments with a bit of it and see how you get on.