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Looper's Delight
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Andy Butler wrote: "hi Rick It seems you're using the "nobody did it before, therefore you won't be able to do it" No Andy, my argument is that due to the inherent limitations of human nature (in terms of driving anything off of human timing) that it is a vastly more musically efficacious approach to have the drummer play off of the loop rather than try to control the loop by taking calculated timing from, say, the drummers kick drum. If you are skeptical of this statement then I enjoin you to download the midi tap tempo freeware plugin from Analogue X and practise tapping to music that you know that has a steady rhythm. Try as hard as you can and just be amazed at how much your rhythm timing will vary from beat to beat. Even when you take a program that averages your tempo over four beats or even four bars you will continue to vary your BPM. Why the human being is so much better at playing to a loop (or entraining with a human being) than the machine is to reading our playing and then sending out a sync pulse is because we stretch our rhythms to entrain in a way that it would be virtually impossible for a computer to read (at least in the forseeable future). I know that you are 'never say never' kind of guy (a quality I love about you, frankly) and there are always exceptions to the rule but I have been watching this phenomenon for all of my adult life and despite the great increase in computational power of todays micorprocessors I have yet to see anyone accomplish this in a way that sounds good musically. Som I'm not coming from a curmugeonly place.................I'm coming from a 'best advice I can give you with 25 years of experience' AND the honest solid desire I've had for years for people to solve this problem. That being said and done, I"m with you. I hope people don't quit trying. ******************* It's funny, but as much as I have always been an apologist for things like drum machines and machines that either replicate human played music or loop it, there are just somethings that a human being does that are much more sophisticated than current techology allows. Human entrainment just has it all over machine entrainment right now. As the software designer who tried to help Antares design a good voice to midi VST plugin said (and I paraphrase because I have only heard this anecdote 2nd hand)..............The inherent limitation of MIDI (16 channels with 127 increments for each channel) makes it so that such a VST is impossible.................the human voice just is too complex a phenomenon to be read well by a midi device....................This inherent limitation in midi (ever listened to midi controlled sequenced multi-samples of ride cymbals? ever heard one that sounded realistic?) was why Antares gave up on desinging that VST plugin. However, they did come up with KANTOS which was using the computer's powers to control a synthesizer (that did not rely on midi) so that it could read human voice and then drive the synth. It's fantastic, but still relatively simplistic in terms of how well it can process complex changes in timbre of the voice. Andy wrote: "One of the big difficulties is monitoring, as you rightly point out. ...but to a large extent the difficulty is due not to the inherent physics of playing music, but because music tends to be over-amplified, and 90% of PAs produce a sound so awful that it's actually quite hard to hear how close the timing is. For a group of musicians with their own high quality amplification set-up the problem could (with co-operation :-) be greatly reduced." You are correct here, absolutely..............but, again, it requires a substantial investment by someone and multiple monitoring busses.....................it's not impossible, but it is quite rare that people have these capabilities within a band. I remember playing a club years ago where every person on stage had a four channel monitor amplifier for their own personal monitor. You could just dial in your own monitor sound quickly on stage...........it was amazing. LOL, I've encountered that setup in one nightclub and in one recording studio in my entire life of playing professionally. One of the problems that comes up is that, say in the case of my playing with my brother the other night: In order for me to be able to play off of my original loop, I need it to be louder than his guitar playing or guitar loops plus his real time playing...............that mix is going to drive him nuts and prevent him from hearing himself well. Optimally,. I needed a monitor of myself alone and a monitor of his playing and he needed the exact same situation, independently controlled by each of us. this is great but requires much more setup time and also has the prerequisite that you have 1) the space on stage for it (we didn't) 2) the time to set it up (we didn't) and 3) the energy to set it up for that quicky gig (analagous to a 30 minute loop festival performance) (again, we didn't). This is pretty typical I would suggest. Andy wrote: ...but why wouldn't it work? Surely it's possible to renew synchronisation more often than once a bar. Yes, but if you'll read what I said (in my overlong post-------but then I'm afraid they're all overly long------<blush>) It is the discreetness of sampling that makes it 'unhuman'. I still say it's better for the drummer to learn how to play to the steady loop. Andy again: "It's also possible to chose sounds for the loop with a different sounding attack to what's going on in the live music, that would make any slight drift sound much less unpleasant." Well this is a very appropriate response unless you are playing music that is highly syncopated where the parts need to interlock rhythmically. When that is the case, you just can't fudge it. You are either locked up or you aren't and it sounds like hell when you are drifting...........................it's awful enough that I don't even attempt it. So, to sum it all up.....................more power to anyone who can solve the problem no matter how they solve it. This is just my best advice as a professional drummer who has seen such a setup fail in every situation I've ever encountered. I stand by my advice, but it's always nice to be proved wrong. I wish everyone luck with it.