[linux-audio-user] metronome-free MIDI recording

[Mark Knecht]

Wolfgang Woehl wrote:
> Hans Fugal <fugalh at gmail.com>:
> 
> 
>>But if I turn off the metronome and record at a free tempo I find that
>>the transports and bar information are more or less useless. It makes
>>it very hard to re-record segments or set up loops, etc. How do you
>>handle MIDI wrt tempo?
> 
> 
> Maybe there is a sequencer somewhere that can be tempo-controlled with 
> a midi volume pedal -- or whatever midipeople call that -- during 
> recording and playback so one could use metronome/bars after all.
> 
> Wolfgang
> 
> 

It's an interesting problem. About a year ago I took some jazz 
recordings that I like a lot by Bill Bruford. I love his drumming and 
was studying it to learn more about how I might program MIDI drum 
patterns. Of course, as you start doing this you want to see how your 
patterns mix and mesh with what a real drummer is doing, so I loaded a 
few of his tracks into Pro Tools, loaded my MIDI patterns, adjusted 
everything latency wise and went to work. The very first thing I found 
was that his band's tempo varied almost measure by measure. 102.15, 
101.56, 102.4, 101.9, etc. It became very difficult to map my work 
against his audio for any extended period of time.

Using Beat Detective (part of Acid) I was able to develop a tempo map of 
the song and do better, but it quickly became an exercise in frustration.

Along the way I ran across an Eric Clapton CD, not well reviewed and I 
don't remember it's name, but the interesting this was when I looked it 
it's audio visually I saw consistencies across complete songs that 
didn't look natural. The audio had an almost over-compressed look where 
the whole tune was the same volume. when I threw one of these tunes 
against Beat Detective I found that the tempo didn't vary at all. 
Reading the CD cover there was a big thanks given to someone for their 
'drum machine programming' . Seems to me that this CD was probably made 
by laying down drum tracks with a box of some type and then recording 
audio against it.

I'm not suggesting that the way Clapton made that record (if indeed he 
did it as I suggest) contributed to it not being well reviewed. That's 
just an observation. However, when musicians play naturally then tempo 
is naturally all over the place. Getting any sequencer to understand, 
follow, record and notate all of this would be a huge accomplishment I 
think. None the less, it would be a very interesting capability, going 
the other way around, for a sequencer to add some capability to generate 
natural tempo changes to notated MIDI to give the output some additional 
life.

Cheers,
Mark