beat detection and sequence tempo

[mulletsaison]

I assume it's possible, but can't figure it out and can't find it here... though I have a feeling I'm going to end up feeling stupid when I hear the answer.

Can you have your sequence tempo track (including changes) to the tempo of live drums played by a live player who sometimes, as live players annoyingly do, speeds up or slows down?

-Nick

[Shooshie]

Even if it's possible, the result would be an averaging of each beat's tempo based on the last beat's tempo, so it would not be exactly like following the drummer. Same goes for any other DAW's attempt to do this, though, so it's not uniquely a MOTU shortcoming. Unless someone comes up with one that starts in the future and processes backward in time, that's what we're stuck with in the laws of this universe. That is, until someone manages to duplicate the human mind, which gets in the groove and can predict where the next beat is going to fall.



Shooshie

[mcevilley]

I assume it's possible, but can't figure it out and can't find it here... though I have a feeling I'm going to end up feeling stupid when I hear the answer.

Can you have your sequence tempo track (including changes) to the tempo of live drums played by a live player who sometimes, as live players annoyingly do, speeds up or slows down?

-Nick

If he happens to be playing straight quarter notes on the kick, you could slave the track to his kick drum and record a tempo map into DP while he's playing.If he doesn't happen to be playing straight quarters on the kick (probably not very likely) you could record him first, then create a tempo map of what he played and it would lock right up with DP.

[mulletsaison]

I assume it's possible, but can't figure it out and can't find it here... though I have a feeling I'm going to end up feeling stupid when I hear the answer.

Can you have your sequence tempo track (including changes) to the tempo of live drums played by a live player who sometimes, as live players annoyingly do, speeds up or slows down?

-Nick

If he happens to be playing straight quarter notes on the kick, you could slave the track to his kick drum and record a tempo map into DP while he's playing.If he doesn't happen to be playing straight quarters on the kick (probably not very likely) you could record him first, then create a tempo map of what he played and it would lock right up with DP.

How would one do that? Sorry if I'm a dunce...

[azusa749a]

mulletsaison, check this one by Circular Logic:

http://www.circular-logic.com/

There's a 30 day demo you can download, although I've never used it.
I hope this help.

[ryst]

I assume it's possible, but can't figure it out and can't find it here... though I have a feeling I'm going to end up feeling stupid when I hear the answer.

Can you have your sequence tempo track (including changes) to the tempo of live drums played by a live player who sometimes, as live players annoyingly do, speeds up or slows down?

-Nick

If he happens to be playing straight quarter notes on the kick, you could slave the track to his kick drum and record a tempo map into DP while he's playing.If he doesn't happen to be playing straight quarters on the kick (probably not very likely) you could record him first, then create a tempo map of what he played and it would lock right up with DP.

How would one do that? Sorry if I'm a dunce...

Record Beats (pg 649) will be the best way to create a tempo map on the drums after they have been recorded. It would be cool if there was a way to create a goove template in realtime that followed a kick drum or snare shot.....

[Spikey Horse]

I agree 'record beats' is the best way IMHO (well it does depend on the kind of music is being made as to how successful any of the other ways prove to be).

IMHO the beauty of record beats is that it is (1) musical (as long as the record beater is) (2) it has 'automatic look ahead tempo analysis' or ALATA® In other words, assuming the person recording the beats is familiar with the song structure, especially the tempo map then they will know in advance when and how the tempos change and be able to move *with* it and not *behind* it.

After recording beats any wobbly bits can be smoothed out using adjust beats (lining up beats/barlines by mouse to your audio transients, or just to produce a smooth tempo line/curve).

OR another favourite of mine is to record a really good *performance version* of the song (forget any other consideration)...... then record beats to it and check all is good in the tempo map ....THEN use that tempo map as your gude to record the song again properly - you can now drop bits in, record parts seperately etc etc but still have a feel of an all out proper live performance.

Sorry I'm tempo-crazy me! being a drummer and what not.

BTW I checked out the demo of that circular logic thing and as far as live performance slaving sequencer to drummer goes it.... er..... sucked! Very out of time and moments where the drummer sped up then immediately had to drop back because the sequencer hadn't caught up. There *has* to be a latency with this kind of tool (you could argue the same for musicians except they can cue each other and are more likely to know where tempo changes tend to occur and can rehearse in any case!) Also, there must be a limit to the *rate* of tempo change this thing can handle.

Maybe for keeping up with gradual tempo 'drifting' it's usable.... I am being extreme and probably a bit of a a ludite, too!

[spirit]

It is debatable whether record beats and having to clean up any inaccuracies of whoever recorded the beats has following the drummer is better than just using adjust beats from the beginning adjusting bars to Kick or hat or snare hits. The disadvantage in using adjust beats (each bar) is that if the drummer is late or early on a downbeat (it can be expressively) and doesn't do it all the way through than the bar on which he is late or early could have the wrong tempo. Personally it seems best to average out over a few bars, but DP doesn't have the option to adjust beats in steps larger than 1 bar- four bars would be nice- though you would have to pick a bar with an accurate downbeat to land or a tempo could be wrong.

Live 4 lags behind when slaved to a tap tempo device and so does DP, even with steady quarter notes being input. It's possible if tap tempo was used whether the conducter track could work if shifted one increment earlier(in the case of 1/4 notes one 1/4 note earlier). But this obviously isn't a solution for realtime slaving of sequencers to a live musician.

[matwell]

In a live performance situation, I've never heard of an automatic method that will reliably have a sequencer follow some type of audio trigger, like a kick drum or such.

What I *have* heard of working successfully is a human being tapping the tempo for a sequencer to follow. Yes, for live shows in Vegas and on Broadway, as they keep cutting and cutting the budget for live musicians, they have been replacing those musicians with sequenced parts. The problem is, they still want the flexibility of having a live orchestra follow the conductor and performers. So, they hire a "tapper". Some poor girl or guy sits there, following the conductor, and taps on a MIDI keyboard. Not sure what type of sequencer(s) they are using, but it's probably DP or something similar. The sequence follows along, based on how well the "tapper" does.

I've never seen this in person, but I've heard numerous stories from my musician friends about it. You'd think that there would be some way for the computer to follow the conductor (I know it's been tried in the past), but it seems that for now, tapping still works best.

[Spikey Horse]

It is debatable whether record beats and having to clean up any inaccuracies of whoever recorded the beats has following the drummer is better than just using adjust beats from the beginning adjusting bars to Kick or hat or snare hits. The disadvantage in using adjust beats (each bar) is that if the drummer is late or early on a downbeat (it can be expressively) and doesn't do it all the way through than the bar on which he is late or early could have the wrong tempo.

For me, at least, it makes a big difference: record beats is just more musical, and your example is partly what I meant - with record beats you can keep the feeling and expression of the performance AND not be thrown by unusually 'expressive moments'. An expresive tempo and yet a smooth tempo! And it is so much quicker as well! Adjust beats for anything longer than a three minute song is a real drag, I do it by the beat ..... I feel 'wrong' somehow unless I do

When I said clean up record beats afterwards with adjust beats I guess I really meant only very occasional mistakes, flams, miss hits (may be no need to at all).

Of course which way works - or which way we choose, if several work - is I think all very subject to individual tastes, and the demands of the particular music.

I just replied to get my post count up to the big 400 only a hundred to go to get my Unicornation mug from James.....

[tommymandel]

Back In the Day, when the Roland SBX-80 was the king of SMPTE synchronization boxes (you fed it SMPTE and either tapped in a click on a button, in time with the music you wanted to sync to, or fed it an audio 1/4 note track in conjunction with the SMPTE), I tried to lock my sequence to a track using it (SBX-80) (not with DP, but rather with a LinnSequencer hardware unit) AT THE SAME TIME that the SBX-80 was 'learning' the click. It was a disaster. I finally learned that you had to first record a pass of click and SMPTE (or tap and SMPTE) and then the NEXT pass, everything would lock up perfectly, but never while you were in the 'learning' pass of the tape.
Now, 20 years later, not much seems to have changed?

[chamelion]

mulletsaison, check this one by Circular Logic:
http://www.circular-logic.com/
There's a 30 day demo you can download, although I've never used it.
I hope this help.

That Circular Logic product looks amazing, and if it works as well as they claim, it would seem to be exactly what mulletsaison has been looking for. I'm surprised it hasn't been referred to again in this thread as yet. If I were mulletsaison, I'd be in there with my ears back downloading the demo. I don't have a need for that kind of product, but if anyone downloads it and puts it through the wringer, could they please let us know how it stacks up?

Cheers,

Geoff

[Shooshie]

In a live performance situation, I've never heard of an automatic method that will reliably have a sequencer follow some type of audio trigger, like a kick drum or such.

What I *have* heard of working successfully is a human being tapping the tempo for a sequencer to follow. Yes, for live shows in Vegas and on Broadway, as they keep cutting and cutting the budget for live musicians, they have been replacing those musicians with sequenced parts. The problem is, they still want the flexibility of having a live orchestra follow the conductor and performers. So, they hire a "tapper". Some poor girl or guy sits there, following the conductor, and taps on a MIDI keyboard. Not sure what type of sequencer(s) they are using, but it's probably DP or something similar. The sequence follows along, based on how well the "tapper" does.

I've never seen this in person, but I've heard numerous stories from my musician friends about it. You'd think that there would be some way for the computer to follow the conductor (I know it's been tried in the past), but it seems that for now, tapping still works best.

I know several music directors in Las Vegas, all Cirque de Soleil guys, directing the major shows on the strip. None of them use anything like that. Their bands/singers play live, but the sound man may add parts now and then, especially sound effects like musical lines that depart from the music and follow an object on stage, or something. Plus, the sound guy literally makes some parts fly through space to follow, say, an arrow shot across the theater, or a musician who plays her wheeled cello around the stage. I've watched them do it in the "O" Show and Mystere; they have a screen matrix in which they draw a path in real time, and the sound seems to be coming from the object itself. Very sophisticated stuff, running on a number of Macs. The O Show's sound was largely running on the Be OS on Macs. I think it's been changed since I saw it, but that was state of the art for them at one time.

The smaller shows (Midnight Fantasy, and other shows that are just nudie fluff for late-night casino goers) are totally canned, so there's no tempo following in them. The dancers dance to the music, and that's that. I'm not saying it isn't done, but it would surprise me if it is. Tap-Tempo just isn't accurate enough to do that in real time, unless your musicians are just pretty sloppy. But it's true that they do take every shortcut they can think of. It's just that for the better shows, the band is part of the action, usually hovering above the stage on one side or the other, or both. In Blue Man Group, the band members even wear flourescent outfits under black light, with flourescent makeup and everything, making them look bizarre, like cartoon figures, stick figures, playing make-believe instruments. But they're very real, and they contribute perfectly to the surreal mood of the whole show.

There are interesting things happening in Las Vegas. It's not the Doc Severinson style bands of the 60s and 70s anymore, and the music doesn't sound sleazy. It's cutting-edge music with World influences. Well done by solid performers. Some of them even use Digital Performer, but not necessarily in their shows. At least one of my friends who directs for Cirque every night on the strip is a huge DP fan, and we sometimes get together when I'm in Vegas just to talk shop. We're talking about people who seriously get excited about work when they can use DP.

Shooshie

[matwell]

Back In the Day, when the Roland SBX-80 was the king of SMPTE synchronization boxes (you fed it SMPTE and either tapped in a click on a button, in time with the music you wanted to sync to, or fed it an audio 1/4 note track in conjunction with the SMPTE), I tried to lock my sequence to a track using it (SBX-80) (not with DP, but rather with a LinnSequencer hardware unit) AT THE SAME TIME that the SBX-80 was 'learning' the click. It was a disaster. I finally learned that you had to first record a pass of click and SMPTE (or tap and SMPTE) and then the NEXT pass, everything would lock up perfectly, but never while you were in the 'learning' pass of the tape.
Now, 20 years later, not much seems to have changed?

OMG, I used to use an SBX-80 all the time!!! Wow, that takes me back. Yeah, I used to do synth overdubs to pre-recorded live rhythm section tracks. Tricky thing was, that the drummer wasn't always with the click (imagine that) so even if you quantized something, it wasn't quite with the band. I always had to offset the SMPTE by about 1 or 2 frames depending on how "rowdy" the drummer got.

You know what? I don't miss that at all...

[Noizemaker]

I usually make the tempo maps with "adjust beats" and I'm getting better and better using it even if it's a long and sometimes painful process. My only problem with is that the tempo changes are sometimes too abrupt. If I go by the measure and the drummer was a bit early a the beginning of a bar then the tempo will varie by a big step and you can hear it. (Especially in the 8ths & the 16ths subdivisions). Is there a way to make all the measures stay exactly with the Bass Drum (or whatever's hitting on the one) and have a smooth tempo calculation in between to ease the the steps? I know I can clean it by the beats, 8ths, 16th etc. but I'm trying to optimize my time and my workflow.