Labs
Ableton Live, The Machinedrum and The Monomachine (Part 2): Minimizing Latency
Posted on | June 6, 2010 | 2 Comments
In Part one of this series, I posted tips for getting the Monomachine and Machinedrum synced and recording properly with your Live sessions. The other half of the equation is which operations to avoid that might introduce latency and timing errors during your sessions.
Ableton Prints Recordings Where It Thinks You Heard Them
I guess this design must be intuitive for many users, but it confused me for a while. If you have a setup with anything but a miniscule audio buffer, monitoring through a virtual instrument witha few latency-inducing plugins in the monitoring chain, you will hear a fair amount of monitoring latency when you play a note. The same goes for recording audio.
When recording a MIDI clip, I expected that Live puts the actual MIDI events when I played them — which it doesn’t. It shifts the MIDI notes later in time to match when you actually heard the output sound — trying to account for your audio buffer delay, the latency of your virtual instrument, and any audio processing delay from plugins in the downstream signal path. There’s one exception to this — it doesn’t worry about delays you might hear due to any “Sends” your track is using.
So your MIDI notes (and CC’s) are recorded with “baked-in” delays the size of your monitoring chain latency. I’m going to call this baked latency.
Ableton Live, The Machinedrum and The Monomachine: Midi Sync Notes
Posted on | June 6, 2010 | 1 Comment
Recently I’ve been (going crazy) getting the timing tight between Ableton and two outboard sequencers — the Elektron Monomachine and Machinedrum. On their own, these silver boxes have amazingly tight timing. They can sync to each other to create a great live setup.
Add a computer DAW into the loop, and you introduce jitter, latency, and general zaniness to the equation. And it’s not trivial — this is obviously-missing-the-downbeat, shoes-in-a-dryer kind of bad. I tested the jitter / latency by ear, as well as by recording audio clips and measuring the millisecond offsets from the expected hit times.
I don’t think this is fundamentally a slow computer / poor setup issue either — I’m running a good interface, using a tiny 32 sample audio buffer. The rest of the setup is an i7 Intel Mac running OS X 10.6.3, Ableton Live 8.1.3, Emagic Unitor 8 midi interface and an Elektron TM-1 TurboMidi interface for the Machinedrum.
Below is a journal of what’s working, what isn’t, and my theories on why… Read more
How To: Algorithmic Music with Ruby, Reaktor, and OSC
Posted on | November 20, 2009 | 2 Comments
The basic idea is to use a simple OSC library available for Ruby to code interesting music, and have Native Instruments’ Reaktor serve as the sound engine. Tadayoshi Funaba has an excellent site including all sorts of interesting Ruby modules. I grabbed the osc.rb module and had fun with it.
I’m giving a brief presentation at the Bay Area Computer Music Technology Group (BArCMuT) meet-up tomorrow, un-officially as part of RubyConf 2009 here in San Francisco.
Here’s a link with downloads and code from my talk. It should be all you need to get started, if you have a system capable of running Ruby, and a copy of Reaktor 5+ (this should work with the demo version too).
Ruby mono sequence example:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Ruby polyphonic drums example:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Leave a comment below if you have any questions, or cool discoveries!
Machinedrum Recursive Sampling Test 02
Posted on | November 16, 2009 | 4 Comments
So this is another example of using the MD’s internal sampler to create a recursive “feedback loop” of sampling and resampling and resampling.… This has a tendency of psychedelically twisting the underlying beat. The way this stuff sounds has really surpassed my wildest dreams.
MD Recurse Test 02 by chakaharta
Machinedrum Recursive Sampling Test 01
Posted on | November 4, 2009 | 1 Comment
This was a first test at using the Machinedrum’s internal sampler recursively. I was trying to emulate my fractal wavetables sounds in hardware, as closely as the MD could do it.
Cool Tricks For Better Mixes
Posted on | September 3, 2009 | No Comments
Recently slugged through mixdown on Super Broken — a track with a meaty kick, a bassline, a sub-bass line, and a ton of percussion. I found the following 5 tips invaluable.
Fractal Wavetables
Posted on | March 20, 2009 | No Comments
Based on work by composer Terran Olson, I’m releasing a Processing applet that lets you play with recursive/fractal sound synthesis by setting a few sliders.
Dancing Spirals
Posted on | January 3, 2007 | No Comments
3D Screen Saver for Mac OS X, complete with customizable settings and full source code.