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

[Mark Knecht]

Brett W. McCoy wrote:
> 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!
> 

That's why you and I love him, right? ;-)

As I said, I was just studying his technique. He's amazing.

As for the humanizing issue, if you are going to use that then you'd 
better record the drum audio early as it won't humanize the same way 
twice and then things get very dodgy. That said I hear good things about 
Hydrogen, but I got started with Reaktor's drum machines too early to 
want to give up on them now.

Take care,
Mark