Midi drums and quantization

Here are some experiments I've been doing with MIDI drums.

This is a Roland TD-04 MIDI drum kit [demo on youtube] controlling an old school Yamaha QY-70 sequencer (pictured above) that I've had kicking around for a couple of years.

I recorded three tracks - the first is a rhythmic/melodic part using a Thai Bell patch. That was fun, and relative easy because it was all arms, not this whole "four limbs doing wildly different things" that I'm currently struggling with. The second is a drum track using a Rock Kit patch. The third is a single snare roll overdub using a Analog Kit patch.

The tracks were recorded at 115 bpm, and you can hear that my live performance is so many kinds of suck - give me a break though, I've only been playing three weeks. The spirit is willing, but thus far the body is completely un-co, as in "unco-operative" and "unco-ordinated".

Here's the track:

Original Track (.wma, 2.8MB)

[Apologies for the wma, but that's the format that my iRiver E100 encodes in, and I don't have a machine handy to transcode to mp3 or ogg right now. Leave a comment if you want to listen to it but don't have enough evil installed on your machine to play it.]

Fixing it in the mix - the miracle of MIDI

Now, if that had been an analog performance on a real kit, captured as sound, rather than captured as digital performance data, there would be nothing that could be done to make that better except to keep practicing for the next two years (which I'll do anyway...)

However, with MIDI, we can do a few things.

Here's what I did:

• Quantize the drum track to eighth notes
• Switch the kit from Rock to Jungle (yeah boyee!)
• Copy the last measures before it all falls apart and turn them into a loop, copying that over the crash and burn

Quantizing magically makes your out-of-time performance "on the one". Or in my case, "mostly on the one accompanied by a few real funky fills that sound awesome, but are actually me playing so far off the one that the computer can't tell one from three and a half".

Here's the remixed track, after about 5 minutes of digital magic:

MIDI Magic! Track (.wma, 2.8MB)

More MIDI options

The other thing I could have done (and which I only thought of later), is to simply reduce the bpm of the "melody" track from 115bpm to something that I'm more comfortable playing at (like 50-60bpm right now), record the drum track performance at that speed, then speed it up again - kind of like Dragonforce do (they do not!).

If you capture live performances (vocals, harmonium, tabla, mrdanga) using a click track or sampled drum beat for timing, then you can add MIDI instrument performances such as this, and use quantize to "fix it in the mix".

You can even record those parts at a slower bpm, then just crank up the tempo when you add them with the live tracks.

Got any more ideas or experience with MIDI? Let me know.

Rock on!