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Looper's Delight
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I've been following this discussion about getting a drummer to sync to a loop or having a drummer (or any musician) trigger a midi device that will then work off of the drummers time (continually retriggering the loop). I've had a lot of experience with this and I believe the latter option will never work satisfactorily for this reason: When human beings entrain they constantly have micro speed ups and slow downs to do so with each other (because we are not perfect and our timing varies subtely even with the most acute of studio trained musicians). What happens is that you don't play a measure of 140.25 BPM against a measure of 140.28 BPM and then compensate in the next measure by playing a measure of 140.31 BPM hoping that your partner will stay steady with 140.28 BPM as a midi tempo reading device will do. Do you get what I'm saying? I feel like it's hard to explain so forgive me if I'm not communicating well. In other words, we are stretching the time beat to beat, 16th note by 16th note to stay entrained with each other. When a drummer triggers a midi device to then trigger the BPM of the loop you are driving there are entire bars of constant drumming that are compensating for the last measure that may have been slightly out of sync. It is really audible when this happens and there is no intrinsic way around the problem. We're not even going to mention the problem of midi latency which can happen. Consequently, I would advise people to have the drummer learn how to entrain to the pre-existing loop. This will mimic real playing much more accurately, and the percieved lock of the loop and the real players will sound much better than trying to have the drummer drive the whole engine. ****************** I encountered this situation a lot in the early 80's when confronting the situation of bands that were using the new Midi language and sequencing in a live setting. All kinds of devices were marketed and sold then to let the drummer 'drive' the band. I never heard a single instance where the feel was excellent. There was an inherent stiffness do to the BPM changing only at the bar line. The same problem happened when I was doing a lot of studio sessions, drumming for singer/songwriters. Many of them had never played with a band before and certainly not a metronome and when you are trying to crank out relatively inexpensive demos you don't have time to teach the singersongwriter how to track to a metronome in a relaxed and musical way. Consequently, we had to either play the basic tracks (usually without the singer sonwriter) to a click track or just be content with 'lumpy grooves'. Several times I had to play with musicians who were not sophisticated session players so they couldn't play to a click very well. We tried to solve this by giving only me, the drummer the click track, and having them listen to me as the time and play to me. The problem with this approach is that I am continually struggling to stay on the click because the other musicians are fluctuating their time. Normally, we would just entrain to each other and go with the human results but again, frequently I'd find myself playing with a whole rhythm section in a band that just wasn't very acute. We ended up all playing together.............all playing to a click track and then going back and erasing the band's tracks and having them go home and practise to my drum tracks so that they could retrack more accurately. Lol, this is a band's worst nightmare about being signed............having to leave their organic process because some producer is to anal about the results he or she wants. Honestly, though, there were a lot of musicians who just weren't ready for a recording session and we did the best we could to serve them. Butch Vig found that Nirvana could not track tight tracks at all. He said later that Dave Grohl was the only professional musician in the group. Consequently, he had the band play sections of the song over and over and over. He then went through and found the tightest sounding bars and looped them. "Nevermind" is a looped record. When Cobain and the rest heard about it, or so the story goes, they were furious. I can understand, but in retrospect, "Nevermind" was Cobain's masterpiece. A lot of people who don't like it's produced feel think that "In Utero" was a better sounding record. It was the reaction of the band to Vig's production and was produced by Steve Albini ( a great non-producing producer who has an incredible knack for recording fantastic sounds and getting a band to make great performances and a favorite producer of mine). Interestingly, by the time that Nirvana tracked 'In Utero' they had really improved as a band and had a lot more live shows under their belts so they tracked pretty well. In the long run, my advice is hope and prey that your drummer is really interested in growing as a musician and willing to put in the time to learn how to play to loops. I have found that the majority of drummers out their tend not to want to take that formidable but completely feasible task. Also, it just won't work unless you have excellent monitoring of the loop for you drummer. Unfortunately, as my wife just commented, "That's difficult because in the real world, finding good monitoring is a bitch." What this means is that you will have to be prepared to invest in a separate loop monitor for at least your drummer because you cannot depend on a venue to help you to sound good. I actually found a great solution for this: Inexpensive wireless headphones (about $60-$90) from Radio Shack). They are closed ear and yet you can hear enough of the outside music (i.e., your drumming) to play accurately and with feeling. I advise that you money is far better spent purchasing alternate monitoring than a device that the drummer can trigger to then retrigger the live looping start point. Good luck with it, whichever way it goes. I'll be happy to correspond with anyone who wants to learn how to do this but is having a vexing time with it. yours, in search of good time and a good time, Rick Walker