On Saturday 26 November 2005 02:17 pm, Dave Phillips wrote: > Btw, *anyone* on drums would be a vast improvement, but for the > record here's some advice to recordists following my Ardour > adventures: If you need to use a drum track composed with a MIDI > sequencer there are a couple things you can do for greater realism. > First, use a sample player like Specimen or Linuxsampler, you can > then set variations in pitch on the snare and bass drums, it makes > a big difference. Although percussion is usually classed as "noise" > instruments there is still a pitch component that is heard. You'll > certainly notice when it's missing, like salt in a cake recipe. > Alas, you can indeed notice it in my tracks, indicating how lazy I > am about this detail (of course it's also easy to improve just by > re-recording the MIDI track using Specimen). The other trick is to > add some sort of "disturbance" to the tempo track to upset the > metronomic regularity. Example: For a song in 4/4 time I'll make a > looping tempo track of perhaps three measures of 3/8 time, with > tempo events at the 16th-note triplet level in a series like > 120-121-122-120-121-122-121-120 and so on. This tempo variation is > slight enough to be felt but not overly-noticed throughout the > track. > > You can also eliminate this tempo dodge just by using Hydrogen and > exploiting its humanization features. :) A reference I've found helpful in programming MIDI files is by Rob Young, "The MIDI Files", Prentice Hall Europe 1996, British Library Catalog ISBN 0-13-262403-6 (pbk). I got my copy in 1998 and it came with a 3 1/2" floppy disk containing examples and exercises. At that time it was USD $30. Hope this Helps, Stephen.
