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Subtle timing nuances play a large part in the feel of much of today's rhythm-based
music.
Martin Walker bangs the drum about creative use of groovy time-tweaking functions.
Music can be broken down into three parts -- melody, harmony and rhythm. Arguably,
the last of these is the
most important for much of today's music, and the accurate timing and placement of
each beat in a riff can
make a huge difference to the end result. The accomplished performer can add that
almost imperceptible
'something' that transforms a pedestrian riff into a killer groove or turns a minor
hit into a classic. We're not just
talking about live performances here. Nowadays, just as much importance is attached
to manipulating the
timing of an existing performance as to playing a good groove in the first place.
Sloppy Timing
The simplest form of quantise (and the original reason for its existence in MIDI
sequencers) is to move notes
that are badly timed back onto the beat where they were intended to be. Devised as
an aid for people with poor
keyboard skills, the idea of quantisation was that however sloppy your
performance during recording, every fluffed note could be pulled back exactly
into line afterwards. This was a godsend to people who knew what notes they
wanted, but didn't have (or didn't want to bother with) the technique necessary
to play accurately and consistently in time.
However, although many people were initially impressed with this basic
quantise function, perfect metronomic timing rapidly fell out of vogue, amid
complaints that such music lacked
soul, due to the absence of human expression. As more was understood about the
mechanics of timing and
musicianship, software developers added more elaborate tests for their quantising,
so that only the notes that
were way out of time were corrected, leaving the little nuances in place to give
some life to the performance.
Then it was discovered that if recordings by top-class players were analysed, their
timing could be extracted
and imposed on other performances. Quantising rapidly became not just a means to
correct mistakes, but a
creative tool in its own right.
Basic Quantise
Although the basic form of quantising moves every note played to an exact location
in the bar, it is still important
to understand the options. First of all, you need to set the quantise value. A
quantise value of 1 will pull every
note played to the nearest whole beat, a value of 2 will pull to the nearest half
beat, 4 to the nearest quarter beat,
and so on. The screen below shows how these three quantise values affect notes in a
single free-form 4/4 bar.
To correct the timing of notes without completely destroying the feel , you need to
select a value for quantise that
relates to the music being played. For instance, if you have a
four-to-the-bar bass drum, you need a basic quantise value of 4 to
pull every note exactly on to the beat. The Over Quantise function is
a more 'musical' offering from Cubase. This not only moves the
notes as before, but detects chords and holds them together when
moving notes, as well as noticing if you are consistently playing
ahead of or behind the beat.
Since basic quantising can rob an original performance of much of its human feel,
various developers produced
ways of pulling notes part way to the exact values. Cubase has Iterative Quantise
which features Strength %
and Don't Quantise parameters. The idea is that you set an amount, such as 50
percent, for Strength, and then
any note not on an exact quantise value will be pulled 50 percent (or halfway) to
the nearest hard quantise value.
By setting Strength to even smaller values, you can keep applying Iterative
quantise to gradually pull each note
closer and closer to the exact value, then stop when you have the desired feel. The
Don't Quantise function (set
in ticks) ignores any notes that are close enough to the exact value to be already
within the limits set by the
Strength value. Only notes that are obviously out of line are moved, leaving any
subtle timing imperfections
alone. Analytic Quantise is a special Cubase option when you are mixing straight
beats and a triplet feel, and
attempts to preserve both feels when moving notes.
Groove Quantise
Once we get beyond the concept of 'correcting' timing, we enter the realm of
rhythmic feels -- the way top
players play certain beats in the bar consistently before or after the strict
timing.
Possibly the biggest motivation in the development of groove quantise was reggae
music, since many people
loved the 'lazy' feel of the rhythm sections (particularly the classic pairing of
Sly Dunbar and Robbie
Shakespeare), who had an almost imperceptible behind-the-beat timing. Performances
by such musicians
were analysed in great detail, and it was discovered that some beats in the bar
were always played away from
the metronome position. At its most simple, in a single 4/4 bar, beats 1 and 3
might have been exactly on time,
but beats 2 and 4 were slightly (and consistently) delayed.
Groove Quantise works by producing a map for a musical bar, which includes a
pattern of these measured
beats. The feel of a particular groove is dependent on the exact position of each
of these beats. To use Groove
Quantise within Cubase, you choose an appropriate map from the selection provided,
and then the relevant
notes in your own music are moved so that their timing exactly matches that of the
groove map.
For instance, the upper (red) sequence of notes in the screen above shows a bass
line played rigidly in
sixteenth notes, while the lower three lines of notes show the effect of applying a
few sample Groove Quantise
settings. The yellow notes use the Slow Shuffle preset; the green ones use the
Heavy Shuffle. Notice how the
four main beats in the bar are still in exactly the same place. It is the in-
between notes that have been delayed,
with the Heavy Shuffle option simply shifting them further to the right. The fourth
(blue) line of notes shows a
real-world example. This has been matched to the audio drum loop described in the
'Rolling Your Own' section,
below. The interesting thing to note in this case is that the shifts are much
smaller. It shows that the timing
changes made by a good live drummer will tend to be quite subtle.
Matchmakers
Although most sequencers come complete with a range of preset groove templates, you
can create your own.
The sort that most people want to make are for matching their MIDI music with an
existing riff, either a MIDI
sequence, or an audio snippet such as a drum loop taken from a sample CD. To make
this easier, a few
sample CDs actually do all the hard work for
you, and provide ready-made groove maps
for the audio loops.
To extract the timings from an audio file, you first need to analyse it to find the
start of each significant beat. This
is done by scanning the file for a sudden increase in level, which normally
indicates the attack start of each
beat. As you might expect, most modern MIDI + Audio sequencers can do this
for you automatically.
Let's start with a one-bar CD-ROM drum loop, and then apply its feel to a MIDI
track. I'm using Cubase VST for this example, but you should find similar
facilities in most current MIDI + Audio sequencers. After importing the drum
loop as a WAV file into the Audio Pool, and then placing it in an audio track,
open this up in the Audio Editor (as shown in the top half of the screen on page
102). Make sure that the
contents of the window to the right of Ed Solo reads 'M-Points' and then click on
the View menu, and check that
Dynamic Events is highlighted.
To translate the Match Points to a quantise Groove Template, you need to select the
Match Audio and Tempo
option from the Do menu, which will take you to the Graphic Mastertrack editor.
Here, in the Audio menu, you
simply click on the M-Points to Groove option, and a new template will appear at
the bottom of the existing list
of Groove Quantise options. I used the
Groove Template derived
from a drum loop to match the timing of a
MIDI bass line, as shown
in the lower part of the screen on page 102.
Notice how much the
hi-hat beats have moved from the exact grid
positions, and how the
strength of each drumbeat that has been
matched to a MIDI note
has also been imposed on the MIDI note
velocity.
Once the Match Points have been successfully created, the second stage happens
automatically -- each
segment of audio between the Match Points will be time-stretched to exactly fill
the equivalent space between
the MIDI notes in question. Fortunately, there is at least one level of Undo in
most sequencers, as the audio data
itself has to be modified to do this. In many cases you will probably get better
results working a little with the
Match Points, and perhaps even massaging them by hand in some cases, before
applying any time-stretching.
It's possible to lock MIDI timing to a complete live drum track, although many
people prefer to sample a few
bars at various points during the song, and then create their own loops to work
from. However, you don't have to
stick with the tempo of the original performance. Although you can get involved in
time-stretching once your
audio loop has had its M-Points added, another command in the Cubase Audio Do menu
is Snip at M-Points
which, as its name suggests, separates the audio into multiple chunks at the M-
Points. Once this has been
done, you can change the tempo of the entire song quite freely, with the audio
staying exactly in sync, by
squashing together or spacing the chunks apart.