Recording with Grid Off

[kanuck]

Any advice on this? I finished writing a song. But the problem is there are weird time signatures and huge fluctuating tempos and such. I've started tracking with Grid off but the problem is if I make a mistake, i'm screwed.. I have to go back and rerecord the whole thing.

So any experience/tips on recording with "grid off"? Thanks.

[3phase]

Any advice on this? I finished writing a song. But the problem is there are weird time signatures and huge fluctuating tempos and such. I've started tracking with Grid off but the problem is if I make a mistake, i'm screwed.. I have to go back and rerecord the whole thing.

So any experience/tips on recording with "grid off"? Thanks.

usually thats no problem.. you better play it correctly in big parts and correct the wrong notes manually by listening to loop section of the recording and move the misplaced events up to the moment they fit.

however with ableton live we have some problems because it places the notes not allways on the timeline wher the events have occured..so the recording has more mistakes than your playing

and even when you get a stable recording the edit tools are not very good.. no list editor or defined position values you can read, makes edits without grid difficult.. for serious keyboard playing and midi recordings its actually better to use another daw.

or you just work with quantizing everything or the wrong played sections.. but you need to manually eliminate offsets in the recording first otherwise abletons quantisation algos cant deal with the material..

problem again.. this offsets can only be evaluated optical..what makes it timeconsuming to just offsets parts of a recording temporarily to quantize them, and move the quantized result back to its original ment position..
At least when you work this way, that only quantizes parts that are really screwed and leave as much natural timed as possible..

with variating tempos it gets even more difficult..
however editing is allways boring and timeconsuming.. the bigger problem is when the recording is screwed and independend from how well you played you need to move any note by hand to make it wright.
I hope L9 will be able to do propper midi recordings.. As it is now its only worth the hazzle with really good sequences.. anything else you are better of with just making an audio recording..

in any case its beneficial to make the audio and midi recording simultaniously..in ideal that would happen in one clip..but there is a workaroundelton to make a grouptrack just for your midi recording and acompanie the midi with a audiotrack, and launch their recording simultaneous.

This way you allways have your orignal playing as refference what can help a lot when accidently doing one wrong move during the try and erreor edit style we have to perform with live.

[kanuck]

I didn't think about targeting just the areas with mistakes.. i'm so used to taking 3 whole takes and then comping. No need to worry about the midi issues since it's a guitar track. Thanks for the idea.

[3phase]

I didn't think about targeting just the areas with mistakes.. i'm so used to taking 3 whole takes and then comping. No need to worry about the midi issues since it's a guitar track. Thanks for the idea.

audio only.. to slice it would be an option.. than it is midi editing.. but that is rather something for rhytmically played material..
but you also can slice by warp makers and mark sections of th eguitar track this way.. but maybe its better to do the slicing just on sections that really need it..

in any case you should have a pilot track from the original recording and do the edited version on an extra track with copied files..
You do the edits in single clips acording to the areas that sound ok and extra clips for the areas that need editing..so one false move dont shifts evrything around that is on a later point..

and all this has to be done in the arrange window..

[mr.ergonomics]

[
however with ableton live we have some problems because it places the notes not allways on the timeline wher the events have occured..so the recording has more mistakes than your playing

can you describe it a bit more detailed?

[3phase]

[
however with ableton live we have some problems because it places the notes not allways on the timeline wher the events have occured..so the recording has more mistakes than your playing

can you describe it a bit more detailed?

switch of input quantisation play on the keyboard, record that via midi.. play it back.. enjoy the drunken version of what you just have played..

like many of live elastic features this seems to come an go with the various beta versions. i swithched back from 8.22 to 8.21 mainly because it went really horrible again..

sofar i dont know what is causing this mess, probaly plug in and track delay related.. however no stable operation one can trust to record customers performances via midi.. and sucks big time on the own playing because similar to the brown henke dither it appears only when it matters... at least you only get it than.. far to easy one accepts the results as your own bad playing.. but.. since i started to record midi and audio simultaniously its pretty clear that my playing is better than abletons midi recordings suggest.


I actually think i know why ableton has so much problems with midi and timing precission.. we came pretty close to the source in the sync threads., where ablton live is not able to get a correct read out of a stable tempo even with rounding.. SO clearly ..the program messes up the timing internally..

And that is probably because of a faulty construction where the timing related services was applied on top of an elastic audio engine instead doing it the other way around.

THe best example how a workstation should be structured you have in a big studio production facility..like a tv station for example.. so multiple studios exchange content in sync or asynchron .. you might have satelite lines to another part of the planet and have to compensate for the latencys.. you have to bring the audio/visual in a propper format and send it thru the master outputs to the transmitter.. all in realtime

pretty much like a live related daw should work..

And in this TV studios there is one key element..the main house synchronizer.. its giving the timecode for the whole house.. and the sample clock for the whole house, and even midi clock and other sync formats for the whole house.. like toothwheels any single sample is attached to a fixed position in time.. conected to an atomic clock the samplerate is calculated and synced wth absolute time information..

this house clock is availabel in all studios..In well done studios with cables of the same lenght so nothing can alter the main sync .. all other time based operations in the whole house are done in reference to this master clock.. a clock that is samplebased..

Thats a construction principle software engineers very often like to forget ..that a sequencer is basically a clock, and that you have to start with the clock services..and build evrything else from that.. Usually they build a complex program and get their clocking somewhere from the computers timers ..and try to get it synced up to the outside world afterwards, instead building an own masterclocking cheme at the programs foundation first..what causes all kind of accuracy problems.
Compare an original roger linn MPC OS with a JJ os and you see what i am talking about..

I hope ableton used the break towards L9 to restructure their infrastukture on the root so we can get rid of all this compromized behaviour. Its not so easy to understand that a software that has to operate multiple realtime audio and even fft streams in realtime cant place a midi event precisely or read a tempo of a stable clock. Its not too fantastic to assume that this is caused by a structural problem.

[mr.ergonomics]

interesting, so you say when you play a vsti synth via master keyboard and record the midi and the audio at the same time the midi is flawed? or how did you compare it?

the only problem with midi i noticed (beside sync via midi clock which just don't work) is that a external midi loopback gets pretty jittered. routing midi in live is 100% precise. but i'm not sure if it's not just a OS problem.

[3phase]

external keyboard but was the placement of the incoming notes. had to move them by hand to match the audio recording

[broc]

I have once measured the timing of MIDI recording and found jitter less than 1ms.
Note that the interface/driver should be able to generate timestamps since Live relies on it.

[mr.ergonomics]

that's an interesting. as I remember my jitter was way higher. may I ask what interface and os you have?

I'm on win7 with an rme multiface via pci and 256 buffer size.

[3phase]

I have once measured the timing of MIDI recording and found jitter less than 1ms.
Note that the interface/driver should be able to generate timestamps since Live relies on it.

on the l8.22 session wie had midi jitter over 10 ms... and you hardly cant call it jitter when the os distributes the midi information just fine but the program screws that internally

[broc]

My test was done on Mac, using Logic to generate notes and record them over IAC into Live.
The recorded notes (zoomed in at resolution 1/2048) showed timing variations less than 1 ms.

So this test seems to confirm the behavior as described in the manual fact sheet:
There is constant latency depending on audio buffer, but very few variations/jitter.
(Note that the IAC driver ensures generation of timestamps).

[mr.ergonomics]

thanks for reporting back broc, I tested it again. It true that I get low jitter (most less then 1 ms, max 2 ms) when I record a midi signal from a external source (cubase to ableton). but as soon as I play midi in ableton and record it again via loopback I get a pretty big jitter (about 8-14 ms). the recorded note length was a bit shorter, but that may be a fault from midi source or my fault, will check that again.

ableton->out->in = big jitter
in->ableton =low jitter

so I think it save to say that just recording midi in ableton don't seem to be a problem under normal circumstances(didn't test high cpu load and stuff like that). that's good to see.

[broc]

Interestingly, with loopback (over IAC) I get the same low jitter as with external source.
Could it be that your loopback method doesn't generate proper timestamps?

[3phase]

the missplacement of midi events i am talking about is unstable behavior and not the standard operation.. problem..i experiance this problem from time to time in L8 since the early versions..it comes and it goes.. also in earlier times of lifes midi implemetation we had thos problem wher you just couldnt run life without quantisation.. you remembre? the times wher inpt quantisation was on as default? a rather bad joke back than but showed the problems ableton had with implemeting theire midi..

i sometimes wonder why midi has to be hadled different than audio and why one just cant transmit midi via the audio streams.

At least in abletons case when they introduced theire midi the first time i was surprised that they havent used theier audio clip concept for the gui functionality.. so no transpose..no warp markers and so on..instead an oldfashioned piano roll with minimal functionality. Not really a modernistic approach and actually getting in the way of possible multitrack edit options where one might want to edit mixed track packages of midi and audiotracks in one go.. For that a unified parameter set would have been highly beneficial.