[LAU] Composing fast[was] LAM annual Best of mix 2009

[Brent Busby]

On Fri, 11 Dec 2009, david wrote:

> Brent Busby wrote:
>> Sometimes I do like to turn off the bars/beats/ticks ruler in Ardour,
>> forget about quantizing (or throw sequencing out the window entirely),
>> and just record, and let the quarter note pulse come from me.  Then I
>> can just record layers over it.  It's almost as free as 4-track
>> cassette...but *much* better audio quality...
>
> That's sort of like me. I'm horrible at deciding beforehand just how
> fast a piece should be, or what time signature it should use. (I'm still
> trying to figure out the time signature of the little riff in the
> improvisation I posted a few weeks ago - and I've been playing that riff
> for 4-5 years now.) So I'll arm a track in Rosegarden and just start
> playing - then have to sort through the resulting mess when I've finally
> played my way to the time/tempo the song wants.
>
> Perhaps I should request a new feature in Rosegarden: a "no time
> signature" mode. Just let the notes come in as they may - and clean it
> up afterwards.
>
> I just asked about that on the Rosegarden-users list, will see what
> comes of it.

In the early 90's, there was a hardware sequencer, the Alesis MMT8, that 
was very popular and is still used by some people today, just because it 
was capable of recording a single, open-ended sequence as long as your 
whole song.  (And of course, you could do that with quantization off...) 
If you ended up with a sequence 684 "bars" long, fine.  And who says 
your playing even had to pay any attention to where the machine thought 
the measure lines in the 684 sequencer bars were?

I think something like this could still be very popular, because not 
everybody who sequences is always sequencing dance music with robotic 
timing.  (I do like techno, but that's not all I'm interested in.) 
Often all people want the sequencer to be is a free-form Midi event 
generator.  Just let the humans worry about tempo and beats...

-- 
+ Brent A. Busby	 + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ UNIX Systems Admin	 +  banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago	 +  eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ Physical Sciences Div. +  Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ James Franck Institute +  we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky