08 January, 2006
Music, delays and perl nightmares
Music
I couldn't sleep again (I drifted off only to wake a few minutes later from a nightmare about Perl and HTML - yes, the new Cogent website is nearly finished), so I've finished up another track: Slumpy (ogg or mp3).
The background noise is this sample, by Bram, on Freesound. It's people talking at a railway station in Donetsk, in the Ukraine (I think).
Also, while I was awake and waiting for things to upload, I thought I'd write down another tracker tip.
Delay
I love trackers. But they are quite limited in some respects when compared to sequencers.
In particular, trackers don't have anything like the resolution for placing notes that sequencers do. However, this is only really a problem if you're trying to record notes as they're played on a keyboard without losing the human feel.
And since most people record their notes in a sequencer and then quantise it to remove the imperfections, it's no great loss.
Sometimes, though, you just need to be able to squeeze something in between the lines. This example uses the same samples for the beat in Slumpy. They're recorded individually in this file. In case you need to know, the samples are numbered 1, 2, 8, 9, 6, 12, 12 in the screenshots below.
First, here's a beat. Listen and look at the screenshot (right) from CheeseTracker.
You can hear what I'm after, but it sounds a bit wrong. The problem is that it's too regular and stilted.
What we need is to move some of the hits around, but we have no more lines to put them in. It is possible to enlarge the track, run it at double speed and add blank lines between the current ones, but that's a hassle and still doesn't quite solve the problem.
Instead, we can use the delay command. This command (in the far right column of a channel) has the form SDx, where x is a number of ticks to delay the note by. At this speed (6) and tempo (125), you can delay by up to 4 ticks before the sample is entirely cut off by the next note.
Now look at the new pattern (left). Notice that I've delayed all the odd numbered rows (they start at 0, of course) that have a note in them. This makes the beat shuffle instead of sounding insanely regular. Have a listen.
It's not just useful for beats, of course. In fact, anything other than some trauma-inducing techno tends to sound better when the spacing of some of the notes is shifted slightly.
Important tip: usually, you need to stick to one offset for all instruments, otherwise it sounds like the timing has gone wrong.
Also useful is cut (SCx) which cuts a note after x ticks, and retrigger (Qex) which retriggers the note every x ticks, with a volume modification y.
Right, now that I've got Perl out of my head, I'm going to
sleep or die "trying";
Damn.
