>From: tim hall <tech@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
>I found your english a little hard to understand in this instance. What file
>format are you looking to store your rhythms in? MIDI? wav? something else? I
>would have thought you'd want to store them in a format which could easily be
>transferred between applications, but perhaps I am misunderstanding (?).
Hello. I figured out an analogy: A dish-washer machine has racks shaped
for holding different type of dishes. There is a place for cups and
glasses and a place for plates. To a place meant for a cup, one can
put a glass, a bigger glass, a plastic cup, a coffee cup.
I want make "dish racks" for percussion rhythms. I don't want force
what percussion sounds one eventually uses.
In a sequencer or an audioeditor I could set snap-to labels or marks.
E.g., a "dum" label for a bass percussion. Then I would save these
label sequences to files. A musician could select and load these
label sequences and snap-to the sounds to the tracks.
MIDI is good in that one could easily change the instrument assigned to
all "dum" labels -- in the case where all "dum" sounds are the same.
But we often want have slightly different sounds on each "dum".
MIDI is also good when we want test different rhythms quickly.
Maybe a hybrid system would work better: Named Snap-to labels
and the sounds assigned to the names. First, musician sets sounds to
"dum", "tak" standard labels. Second, musician finds the needed
rhythm. Third, musician renames the labels and assigns different
sounds to the new names. Old names could stay the same if musician
wants to test some other rhythm with the original default sounds.
Two utils are needed: the label track and a name-vs-sound list:
-------------------------
dum tak dum tak tak
-------------------------
dum bdrum.wav
tak snare.wav
Musician may add a new name manually to the list and rename the
labels, or may snap-to a sound to the track.
I would have implemented such a tool to Audacity but Audacity's label
track is not good because the labels cannot be edited. Only the track
"tape" under the labels can be edited: e.g., if one cuts out a piece from
the beginning, the whole rest of the tape moves forward and the label
timings are lost. Also, I could only add labels not remove or move them.
We should standardize the rhythm format so that the rhythms could be
used in any software. So, how to fit the above ideas to existing
systems? Not everyone want use purely my system, I'm sure.
Regards,
Juhana
