?'s about assigning parameters in MIDI

[wetpaint247]

Okay I picked this up in another thread a few weeks ago

t is a obvious thing when you listen to tracks like "Cry me a river" by JT (to stay in the Storch-area, cauz he played keys on that track ). But that may be, because all the drum-sounds were "beatboxed" by Tim...

On "Candy shop", the kick is a good example. Except for the end, it´s changing it´s pitch and pitch-envelope all the time...(same goes for volume-envelope and the moving bandpass-filter). Those are subtle things, but audible...definitly bringing "live" to the drums. Otherwise, you would get bored with the loop after 2 mins

On "Hollaback girl", it´s the kick and snare/clap.

And it also saves hours working the "grid"; so even if you hard-quantisized everything, you can still bring back some "funky drummer" into the groove, without moving every single "hit" by hand Controlling those parameters with MIDI probably saved me 10 years of my life
The good thing is, you can use it on every single sound in the song (and you should).

You can find a simple example attached to this mail...ment to be audible, not of any musical value though

I just took a 808 bassdrum, played two notes over 1 bar, looped it to 4 bars. (example 1)

Then I assigned a controller to the Volume Attack, tweeked it, recorded it. (example 2)

Another one to the sample´s Pitch Envelope Amount... (example 3)

You can already hear the difference and the "idea" behind it.

Example 4 shows you, how you can apply that "technique" to effects (the 8 bars from example 3 repeat, so the verb´s mix level is changed over 16 bars).

Example 5 is similar to example 4, just with a modulation of the verb´s Decay Time...

So I started from two BD kicks (1 bar) and ended up with 16 different bars and 4 parameters that change, so no, the modulating parameters are in no way linked to the original loop.....otherwise, it would be useless and would make you produce just that...another 4 bar loop that repeats all the time.

I hope this is helpfull somehow...If I find an hour or two during the weekend, I will definitly upload a whole beat, so that you can hear the modulations on a whole track.

it intrigues...now this might be some real basic shit to yall but how exactly do you assign a controller to control these values? I have an maudio axiom and have only really used the keys and none of the knobs...

so does he mean recording a performance of tweaking xvalue of pitch or whatever, or does he mean assigning the controller to change the values of whatever parameter incrementally at random within a certain range...

and regarding 'modulation of a decay time', what does that mean? i just thought modulation meant creating like a vibrato or changing the tone color or some shit, i have no idea what the means pertaining to effects? help?

[doctah]

Maybe start by telling what application you're using. Setting up your controller in Cubase is different than say Reason.

[Bjones]

Originally Posted by wetpaint247

Okay I picked this up in another thread a few weeks ago



it intrigues...now this might be some real basic shit to yall but how exactly do you assign a controller to control these values? I have an maudio axiom and have only really used the keys and none of the knobs...

so does he mean recording a performance of tweaking xvalue of pitch or whatever, or does he mean assigning the controller to change the values of whatever parameter incrementally at random within a certain range...

and regarding 'modulation of a decay time', what does that mean? i just thought modulation meant creating like a vibrato or changing the tone color or some shit, i have no idea what the means pertaining to effects? help?

Modulating, is simply a fancy word for a change/inflection....

You can actually modulate the decay without assigning any midi paramatars of any sort, - you simply hold down the pad/key for less time..

You can do the pitch envelope thing by simply using pitch bend.

An interesting example of this would be Rich Boys "touch that ass" on his new album.

Every time the main kick is hit, it triggers the 808 kick under it to pitch bend down an octave. Once the main kicks decay is cut off, the 808 pitch bends back up. It happens in literally half a second, so you gotta pay attention to catch it.


On most VSTs or softsynths, you can do this by simply hitting tab to view the backside/rear, and you simply plug the CV out into the CV in of which ever sampler you want to modulate.

About the random thing...let's load up a flanger or phaser.

Say the tempo is 75. I'll set the tempo on the effect to something like 95. So at :30, the phaser will hit it's deepest freq on the 3rd bar. While @ 2:15 it might hit it on the middle of the 1st bar. So that's "random" in a sense.

[wetpaint247]

cubase and ableton for now with waves plugins. i have been using a few vsts but say the arp2600v for this situation

i want to milk the forementioned...am very open minded but there seemsto be alot ofpossibilities within those to explore you smell me? am searching for logic that could be used in different scenarios

word re:modulation thanks for clearing that up

regarding the example of the rich boy song, so was that 808 pitchbend stuff done live or by midi

very interesting regarding the phaser/flanger example, im gonna have to experiment with effects more. so you mean plugging the cv of the vst synth into an audio track in cubase in addition to recording a midi performance? or using an additional external sampler application?