How to deal with Midi recorded material when they do not fit the rhythm grid ?

[Tchandra]

Hi,

I’m relatively new to music softwares (I was only a guitar player before) and my main issue with midi is to get a good groove. I don’t like drum machine types of beats, where all the notes are quantized to a grid so I use some pads for the drums (actually Maschine mikro) and a midi keyboard for the other instruments. I can start a « song » by entering some notes with the mouse on a grid, to look for some ideas but rapidly I have to move the notes a little bit before and after the beat to make it sound the way I want and generally I end up recording everything manually…

That way, I can get the groove I’m looking for, but there is a little problem : generally I tend to speed up or down a little compared to the metronome, or I play a little bit behind the beat and so on. I may more or less quantize what I have recorded but generally it removes the actual groove I wanted to create, so I have to keep what I have played the way it was recorded, these slight changes of speed are not a lack of accuracy (it may be that of course) but what I want to hear. The problem is that, after several bars, my midi notes do not fit with the grid anymore… So I cannot use the metronome of my daw, or the grid, and so on.

So what I do for the moment, if a want to record a drum pattern, I enter with the mouse on the grid some hi-hat 8th notes for example to have a basis with the right speed, then I translate this pattern to fit what has been played before (so as to feel that this group of hihat notes keep the rhythm of the previous part), and I use this as a basis to record the other stuff.
I may put these notes in a separate track to have a kind of custom metronome track...

My main daw is reaper, and there is another way to deal with that problem : there is an option where you can change the speed of the song on a section and read the midi notes at the speed they have been recorded. So that way, it is possible to compensate for a change of speed, but it is not very handy…

So, how do you deal with that ? One way is to put all the notes into the bars by shrinking a pattern, or quantizing, but what if you want to keep the actual groove you have recorded ? I don’t see any easy approach…

[Tchandra]

I've just found that this is generally called "tempo mapping" and that there are some tools in reaper sws extension to deal with that

Here is a link about it :
http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=118061

I will take a look at it...
These tools seem to be mainly used to determine the tempo of an audio record, but it should be possible to use them during the creation of a midi based tune (?)

[Tricky-Loops]

There also a groove tool in the SWS extensions that could be used:

http://wiki.cockos.com/wiki/index.php/F ... roove_Tool

I don't like quantization that much (as it always sounds too artificially), I tend to nudge the midi notes manually to keep the groove.

BTW, Reaper is pretty basis in that stuff, there are better DAWs for it (Ableton Live? Cubase?)

[Tchandra]

So if I understand it clearly, this groove tool can "paste" a predefined rhythm pattern to a group of midi notes ? It looks interesting, if you have created a groove you like, you can apply it anywhere in the track . Thank you.

I don't like quantization that much (as it always sounds too artificially), I tend to nudge the midi notes manually to keep the groove.

I do the same, especially with the kick drums and the bass notes, because if they are not perfectly synched, you hear it immediately and it is almost impossible to record them perfectly.


Here is another link showing the use of the SWS tempo tools :
http://wiki.cockos.com/wiki/index.php/T ... n_with_SWS

Maybe other daws feature some better tools, but this looks quite good to me, I don't know... But, in Maschine, which is assumed to be a rhythm oriented software, there is no such tool. Actually, you cannot change the tempo at all...

[lfm]

As I remember you can set playback speed on every item in Reaper.

So split your recording accordingly, and change speed(F2 dialog).

One way....

[Tchandra]

Thank you for your response.

Yes, you're right. Actually to use the SWS tools I've talked about, you need to set all the items at their own playback speed (the speed they were recorded), and not the speed of the projet, so you can change the grid "behind" them (by localy changing the speed of the project). The idea is to have the grid matching the speed of the recorded items.

I am not sure it is such a great idea...because, it may cause some plugins to glitch, those synched to the host tempo (like delays, samplers and so on...). I don't know yet...