[nama] Re: Wolfdream article on Nama
- From: "S. Massy" <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Joel Roth <joelz@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2012 12:37:58 -0400
On Thu, Aug 09, 2012 at 10:08:21PM -1000, Joel Roth wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 08:03:50AM +0200, Julien Claassen wrote:
> > Evening Joel1
> > Hm as far as I understood the timing adjustment task, it's about
> > moving single notes or small groups of notes in a track. Things,
> > that a friend of mine likes to do quite often with his bass playing
> > to make sure it's perfectly aligned to the drums. And that indeed
Quite correct. Most amateur and semi-pro musicians/producers wouldn't
necessarily bother with this, but it's pretty much expected nowadays in
the context of a commercial pop production.
> > wouldn't be simple in Nama. That's partly Ecasound's problem too.
> > Because once you've cut the correct piece of music, you can't adjust
> > it in realtime, since the playat can't be adjusted in realtime.
You also usually want a cross-fade, because the edit would be much too
obvious otherwise.
>
> As I mentioned, it's a task analogous to edits.
>
> You have to define a region, zero the same region
> in the mother track, and then transform the region
> (in this case displacing it in time) while the
> rest of the content in the mother track remains unchanged.
>
> You can't do it in realtime, but you can do it by
> stopping and restarting.
>
> Whatever DAW does it, faces the same issue, and has to
> do something similar. MIDI is a wholly different medium
> with an ability to easily shift individual notes.
In theory, you're quite right (I gave this some thought before even
writing the article). The two main problems I see are of interface and
resources. Usually, you might have at most 5-6 punch-in/out style edits
on a track, unless you're dealing with some fairly abysmal musicians or
a very long song, but you might have 20, 30 fine edits or more on a
track, because, say, the drummer's kick is often ahead. Handling this
would be nightmarish. Also, imagine how many chains you might end up
with if you have to repeat this task on 6 or 7 tracks? I don't think
that would scale too well. The only solution I could come up with was a
special fine-edits mode which would:
- Create a temporary mixdown for reference along the track being edited.
- Enter a special environment optimised for the task: define audio
snippet, shift it, choose cross-fade, reference, repeat until
satisfied, move on, repeat.
- Mix down all edits to a track upon leaving fine-edit mode.
It seemed to me like a rather tall order at the time...
>
> Meanwhile, I'm trying to figure out what to do first.
Relax on the beach? Seriously, though, I'm glad I gave you something
better than the dismal (at least from this foreign standpoint) American
presidential campaigns.
>
> Where are all the Google Summer of Code students?
I've heard there are a lot of talented programmers in Russia. Perhaps I
could brush up my long disused Russian and try and convince them to come
over? Only, it'd cost a fortune in vodka and tea. :)
Cheers,
S.M.
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