This is your brain on drums … any questions?
KeithHandy posted in Coding, Instruments on May 23rd, 2006
Lennon was dead. Bonham was dead. Floyd were primed to split.
But worst of all, The Drum Machine had just signed its multi-million dollar contract, and one way or another you were going to have to confront it.
No musician in his right mind could have anything but a love-hate relationship with the thing. It was death knell and panacea rolled into one, in a portable black box. It forced you to re-examine whether or not there was such a thing as ethics when it came to making music, and the already fuzzy line between right and wrong became exponentially more elusive.
In a way, things are better — I daresay cooler — now, because you no longer have to defend and justify technology. It just is. And it exists in harmony with instruments and talents that took centuries to evolve, secure enough in its own power that it no longer needs to bare its teeth at the old geezers. You no longer choose between black (drum machine) and white (real drummer) — your pallet is an infinite gradient. Electronic sounds can be mapped to organic performances, and vice versa. Quantization can be done in degrees. Sampling can be done at the individual hit level, or at the pattern level. Things can be combined and edited in infinite ways. And ironically, proficient drummers stand to benefit the most from the tools.
The diagram above is just an organized brainstorm of the various ideas I’d like to connect together regarding drum tracks. A lot of the components have already been successfully coded. In particular, a way of mapping live human performance to a smooth list of tempos — see the upper left — has come a long way, baby. This is good for when I want to start the recording with an “unplugged” performance, and layer it up from there. This gives me my GRID.
I’ve also had some success with generative pattern mutation. Rescuing the kick and snare from dead repetitition, yet establishing ground rules to keep them out of the bullshit zone. (Example: three fast kicks in a row is bullshit. It screams “I have a drum machine and I don’t know what I’m doing.”)
Immaturity is just an idea at this point. It’s about deliberately inducing timing inaccuracies — not on a random per-note basis (that would just be “sloppiness”), but rather mimicking the subtle stretch-and-squash that happens when humans switch from one note duration to another. All the while, of course, paying reasonable mind to how far thou shalt stray from THE GRID.
This chart will undoubtedly grow more tentacles as I go along.
As for musical uploads, I’m still waiting for my old computer to talk to my new computer. And then we will have fun.
