metronome

[josep skitto]

why people using metronome while recording?

[David Nahmani]

19 minutes ago, josep skitto said:

why people using metronome while recording?

In order to keep a straight tempo throughout the entire song and not deviate. Some drummers tend to slow down or accelerate in parts of a song or throughout the entire song and that can sometimes be nice but at other times that can affect the level of energy of the song negatively. 

I've played with drummers who hated to play to a metronome and just couldn't do it, and I've played with drummers who loved it and said that freed them from having to worry about keeping the tempo constant and allowed them to better focus on other things such as the feel, groove, contrast, dynamics, accents etc. 

It's when you play live in front of an audience that you really start to realize the importance of playing at the intended bpm and keeping the tempo constant throughout the song (if that was the original intention). The worst in my opinion is a drummer who slows down gradually throughout the song. That can really drag the song down and ruin the energy. 

[fuzzfilth]

4 hours ago, David Nahmani said:

Some drummers tend to slow down or accelerate in parts of a song

...in contrast to all the guitar and the saxophone players who invariably have impeccable timing, and lets not forget the singers who always seem to have a caesium clock built in.

[MikeRobinson]

One of my drummer friends once put it this way:  "it's for the same reason that I use cruise control while driving – it keeps me from annoying other drivers by driving too slow, and it keeps me from getting speeding tickets."

I also watched one drummer who used a tempo reference that consisted of a flashing LED light.  I'm guessing that there must have been some kind of "app."

[fuzzfilth]

I have talked a couple of times about my drum rig which deals quite flexibly with this during live shows. Depending on the situation, I'm using four kinds of tempo reference:

1. Tempo click only in my in-ears which I start and stop before I myself count the band in, to get a rough reference from where we can take it where we like.

2. Count In (in everyone's in-ears) followed (or not) by ongoing tempo click only in my in-ears.

3. I wrote a MIDI plugin in C++ which I named Tempomat, it analyses the time between snare hits and shows the resulting tempo against a reference in real time, with extra green colour if I'm within a 5% accuracy corridor and blue colour if the snare is on, but not on 2 and 4. This is great when I need to hit a certain tempo halfway through the song, but I don't want to tie myself up with a click until then. Looks like this:

4. In situations where I can't have in-ears, there's a light metronome which signals the tempo quietly to everyone with a sight line to the Macbook screen:

Edited May 17, 2022 by fuzzfilth

[MikeRobinson]

So, @fuzzfilth, do you sell these things? 😀

I do think that you could "make real money" from both of them.

Edited May 25, 2022 by MikeRobinson

[fuzzfilth]

59 minutes ago, MikeRobinson said:

do you sell these things?

I have often thought about this in the past 30 years, and I'd really like to. The thing is - the market for this is so small that there's hardly a point setting up any infrastructure (advertisement, payment, support, updates, etc.) for this.

To get Tempomat to do what it does (reference tempo display can be set manually or by MIDI CC and is independent of DAW tempo or Play/Stop status, actual tempo display in green colour shows precision and in blue colour shows half/double tempo/dotted eights/triplets + precision, letters are large and window is small yet scalable) as an AU MIDI plugin took some serious effort to get into C++ programming , which can't ever be recouped by selling 10 or 15 copies. 

Then, Logic's Environment, as powerful as it is, has always been fragile. It's frustratingly easy to delete a Cable which then might change the destination and sequential order of 15 other Cables that moved up one slot because of that slip, all with zero feedback or warning from the application, and if I don't mess it up, the poor client will.

Also, Apple is notorious for screwing up vital functions in the Environment between point-point-updates, no less. So Environments might break left and right after any updates, which would be a nightmare to support.

Plus, the fact that Apple is actively phasing out the Environment is not something to build a business upon, unfortunately.

Edited May 25, 2022 by fuzzfilth

[MikeRobinson]

Why, indeed, does "deleting a cable" in the Environment cause any other cables to "move at all?"  That never happens on my (physical ...) patch board!

[fuzzfilth]

Two scenarios where this may come up:

You have a Cable Switcher which is used to route data to three (or 128) different destinations, depending on the CS's fader value 0-127. Once you have patched the three (or 128) cables, deleting one of them causes all following Cables to move up one notch, thus all fader values greater than the deleted Cable will route to wrong destinations.

Likewise, if you use an Ornament or a Monitor to mult one event to a) flip a switch, b) run the event through that switch to a certain destination and c) reset that same switch, all from the same one event, deleting any of these Cables will route events to wrong destinations and thus break the functionality of this setup.

Edited June 6, 2022 by fuzzfilth