playing live to samples without a click

[france12]

I am looking for a system (hardware based or software based) were the drummer is the one that makes the beat and not the click he hears in order to play to samples. I have looked arount and found ADIG Beat Humanizer it generates midi time codes from analog or midi inputs ie. it guesses the bmp and sends them on.
Now I have tried this with live (the perfect tool for elastic musik according to the press) and when Live is a slave it really goes bonkers (i get bmp changes of - 30 bpm eventhough it sometimes actually says what adig beat humanizer says. Is there another easier solution or is my setup wrong. any ideas.

thanks

[malutki]

How about getting some sort of MIDI Pad or DrumTrigger for your drummer
and connecting that to Live's tap tempo?

[france12]

that is a bit difficult because a drummer may make a double hit and the tempo would jump from 60 to 120. this beat humanizer seems to recognise that ie. it allows only a certain beat variation possible ie between 50 and 70 bmp for instance so you can play organically on the drums or on apad and it recognises your tempo whatever the complexity of the hits are in theory

[france12]

I have tried InTime from circular logic as Midi-clock source the bpm swings are still to be seen +-50 bmp. really unstable.Is this a live issue?

[malutki]

that is a bit difficult because a drummer may make a double hit and the tempo would jump from 60 to 120.

OK, you want the drummer to just play his beat, and Live to sync up to that?
No Idea about the products you mention, maybe is possible.

what I meant was more like the traditional stick-clicking before a song: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 (-5 -6 -7... whatever your time sig)

only it would happen on the pad/trigger before and also during the song whenever the complexity of the beat allows.

Of course it would not even have to be the drummer to tap the tempo, it could be another or several band members,
that have their hands or feet free at the moment...

It's a bit DIY, but at least it definitely works

[SnackDaddy]

Hi france12,

This is Michael, the lead developer of InTime at Circular Logic. We expect InTime to work well with Live - that's how most of our users are using InTime. Live is great with InTime because of its real-time audio stretching to match changing tempos. Can you tell me how you're using InTime such that you get Live's bpm swinging by +/- 50bpm?

If you just setup InTime to control Live and press play without having a musician playing, is Live following solidly at the tempo set in InTime? If you then bump InTime's tempo up and down (ctrl-up/down arrow), does Live follow properly (there's a slight lag for larger tempo changes because of Live's midi-clock sync mechanism). I can suggest more things to check if you like.

InTime keeps hardware and software like Live sync'ed to a live musician (usally a drummer) while he plays naturally. The musician listens to InTime's output in some repeating rhythmic form, either a click or a simple rhythmic loop played by InTime or Live. This completes a feedback loop allowing InTime and the musician to stay in sync. After a short time of practicing with InTime, 30 miutes or so for most people, you have the feel for it and can push and pull tempo at will.

Let me know if you have any other questions about this, or you can email me directly for other things.

Cheers,
Michael
michael@circular-logic.com

[france12]

i thinks it live 8. i have routed the beat click onto a piano instrument and it stutters at a constant bpm from intime.It stutters and sweeps at 80bpm. The bpm counter of live sweeps around from 60 to 81 bpm periodically. with in time in 100 bpm fixed mode it sweeps aournd 65 to 101. at 140 it's from 84 to 141. I am using yoke since i though my that would reduce the problem but maybe it's my pc that is too slow.

could you suggest maybe another sampler player that works well with intime as an alternative

thanks

[SnackDaddy]

Hi,

I'm trying Live 8 right now (on an XP SP2 box) and it seems fine.

Assuming your on XP, try using Maple Midi Tools instead of Midi Yoke for your virtual midi device connection. Although it sounds like you maybe already tried Maple? Some people report trouble with Yoke on XP. This is likely causing your problem. Maple Midi Tools is hard to find these days, but here's an archived link: http://web.archive.org/web/200308040722 ... sound.com/
As a final try, maybe route the midi clock out a hardware port and then back in again, to see what happens.

Have you tried routing InTime's Beat Click midi output to something other than Live, like the built-in Microsoft synth just for testing to make sure InTime itself is steady? I couldn't tell from what you posted if were saying you routed the beat click from InTime or from Live.

On my system here, I do see Live 8's tempo display moving around more than I used to on earlier versions, but only by +/- 2 bpm. It's likely the small display flucuations I'm seeing are more from Live's method of midi-clock sync'ing and tempo display rather than actual tempo changes. It looks like Live 8 has changed their midi-click sync method to be much more responsive than in previous versions. It used to take several beats to fully adjust to a tempo change, but now it's reacting much faster, almost instantly - but that also means you'll see more jitter. Unless you can close your eyes and hear any tempo flucuation (generally people can't hear small rapid changes), you'll be fine.

It's very unlikely that your system's too slow. InTime uses little cpu. I've used it on Pentium I systems with cpu to spare.

Live is really the only option for InTime if you want to play audio samples or tracks, because of Live's realtime time-stretching and support for slaving to midi clock. If you want to play along with Midi files, you can load them into InTime, or into Sonar, or anything else that will sync to midi clock.

Cheers,
Michael

[france12]

ok i got it the bpm counter is affeced by the soundcard latency weird but true

[SnackDaddy]

That's good news! I agree, weird. I'm assuming it's working with larger audio buffer size? FWIW, my guess is that if the audio buffer is too small, the jitter causes errors relating to the "phase locked loop" calculations Live probably does for slaving to external sync signals.

Cheers