12.01.2009 Rain, Beat Detective and Flex Time
This article talks about the beautiful sloppiness that comes from talented musicians playing in a room together, listening and responding. Lots of Very Commercial Music these days is 100% on-the-grid, and sounds a lot more like a perfect musical robot than like a bunch of humans having fun.
One of the amazing things about the early Jackson 5 recordings, for contrast, is how tight they played together, while still keeping a human groove. Conversely, the first solo MJ albums to have electronically perfect timing bring a punch and sheen that has its own kind of excitement. So, people developed tools like Beat Detective to put a human beat on the grid.
Fixing bad timing? Okay, that'll save you some time. Put everything on the beat? Well, that'll let your skater band go platinum, but it might not make anyone love life more.
(Compare Rihanna's "Umbrella", which I see as a pretty great song with terribly inhuman production.)
...All that said, I try, I really try, to not be all rah-rah-Logic all the time, but. But. Flex Tool/Flex Time in Logic 9 hit me this weekend as a way to fix timings while preserving beautiful imperfection.
Here's my djembe hit. Most of the take was on, but darnit, I just hit that one a bit late. You can see it clearly late after all the other hits, where I was pretty on:
Here, Logic has detected all of my hits. I can use the Flex Tool to just drag one hit earlier, visually lining it up with the musical groove. Note that I'm not moving the whole audio file, and I'm not slicing a region out of the audio file and moving that. I'm just dragging a blob on the waveform, and it's being seamlessly moved-and-stretched (or squished) enough to fill all the gaps and sound natural in a given context:
I'm writing about this because of how impressed I was with the results: This is still a loose groove, but it sounds like a bunch of percussionists who are better than I am. But a couple of beers in, and maybe sitting around a campfire.
Posted by charlie williams at December 1, 2009 03:58 PM
