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

[Brett W. McCoy]

Mark Knecht wrote:

> 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.

That's always a big issue with using electronic drums, they are *too* 
even tempo and mechanical sounding.  A good drum machine should allow 
for 'humanizing' the tempo, so it varies a little in some non-linear 
fashion, as well as the velocities, so the loudness of the transients 
aren't always the same.  A lot of cheap hardware devices don't do 
this... some software ones do (Hydrogen, for example).

Trying to emulate someone like Bruford with a drum machine is going to 
be next to impossible.  Hell, trying to emulate his style with a human 
is next to impossible!

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