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Re:DRIVE the LOOP or be DRIVEN?
Andy Butler wrote:
"hi Rick It seems you're using the "nobody did it before, therefore you
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
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
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
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
Som I'm not coming from a curmugeonly place.................I'm coming
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
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
it, there are just somethings that a human being does that are much more
sophisticated than current techology allows. Human entrainment just has
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
limitation in midi (ever listened to midi controlled sequenced
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
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
timbre of the voice.
"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,
90% of PAs produce
a sound so awful that it's actually quite hard to hear how close the
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
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
and he needed the exact same situation, independently controlled by each
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.
...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
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.
"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
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
So, to sum it all up.....................more power to anyone who can
the problem no matter how they solve it. This is just my best advice as
professional drummer who has seen such a setup fail in every situation
I stand by my advice, but it's always nice to be proved wrong. I wish
everyone luck with it.