Wolfgang Woehl wrote: > Hans Fugal <fugalh@xxxxxxxxx>: > > >>But if I turn off the metronome and record at a free tempo I find that >>the transports and bar information are more or less useless. It makes >>it very hard to re-record segments or set up loops, etc. How do you >>handle MIDI wrt tempo? > > > Maybe there is a sequencer somewhere that can be tempo-controlled with > a midi volume pedal -- or whatever midipeople call that -- during > recording and playback so one could use metronome/bars after all. > > Wolfgang > > 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. Using Beat Detective (part of Acid) I was able to develop a tempo map of the song and do better, but it quickly became an exercise in frustration. Along the way I ran across an Eric Clapton CD, not well reviewed and I don't remember it's name, but the interesting this was when I looked it it's audio visually I saw consistencies across complete songs that didn't look natural. The audio had an almost over-compressed look where the whole tune was the same volume. when I threw one of these tunes against Beat Detective I found that the tempo didn't vary at all. Reading the CD cover there was a big thanks given to someone for their 'drum machine programming' . Seems to me that this CD was probably made by laying down drum tracks with a box of some type and then recording audio against it. I'm not suggesting that the way Clapton made that record (if indeed he did it as I suggest) contributed to it not being well reviewed. That's just an observation. However, when musicians play naturally then tempo is naturally all over the place. Getting any sequencer to understand, follow, record and notate all of this would be a huge accomplishment I think. None the less, it would be a very interesting capability, going the other way around, for a sequencer to add some capability to generate natural tempo changes to notated MIDI to give the output some additional life. Cheers, Mark
