Pulling hits off the beat

[pepezabala]

Other people turn off quantization and shift the hats with the mouse. Then again other people play the hats by hand on a padkontroller. Then there are people who just use quantized hats.

Some people use the groove functionality and apply some random shifting of their drumhits.

If you need to do it by track-delay, then you can always just extract the hats from the drumrack into their own channel. That's one-click away.

[mihai]

take a simple delay set on 100% wet, ms instead of percentage, and "link" activated. automating this should be much easier than having to rearrange anything or be stuck with track delay on one value.

[Angstrom]

Other people turn off quantization and shift the hats with the mouse.

I keep the grid on and shift notes off-grid with the mouse. I'm not sure how many people know about this feature. Grid and grid-Snap is still on, but alt-dragging lets you selectively ignore it.

Method click and hold note(s), press alt and drag the note(s) off the grid.

The order in which you click, hold, and then alt-drag is crucial. you can't press alt and then try to drag, it won't work that way.

if I get a groove I like by doing this, I try to remember to drag it to the groove pool, or whatever it's called.

[agent314]

I keep the grid on and shift notes off-grid with the mouse. I'm not sure how many people know about this feature. Grid and grid-Snap is still on, but alt-dragging lets you selectively ignore it.

I discovered this by accident this week, and it has made my life 6.7% easier when I'm editing clips in piano roll.

[Angstrom]

you keep a very precise "life-ease "index,
I'm impressed

[seattletruth]

You could drop a delay on that drum and set it to 100% wet. Or you could click the note on the piano roll and it will select all of those drums, and drag it over to the side.

How much easier do you want it? It can't be any easier really.

[Khazul]

I guess when he says 'forward' he means before the beat - which probably rules out delays on 100% wet

I tend to do that with snares, pull them a little to get some of the edge in before the beat and push claps back a bit after the beat. Just use alt_drag for this, then when happy - make a groove template for it. If you ever need to change the groove, just drag the results back over the groove in the groove poo, to apply it to anything else that uses it.

Hence I might end up with grooves for hats, snares, claps, percussion, electric bass and a couple for most of the synths and keys depends what Im doing.

One advantage of track delay - it can move stuff before the start of the first beat of a clip - templates cant, hand shifting work if you move something to just before the end, but tweaking it tends to cause horrible glicthes (be nice if ableton would make that smooth) - would make precise alignment alot easier. Also obviously cant tweak individual hits - only slide the whole thing, so I dont find track delay useful for this. Usually only use it when Live and some plugin fall out over what the current PDC value should be and have to line it up again manually - grrr!

[Khazul]

For example if you have pre-shifted claps from venegance they have a specified time in ms you have to pull the forward. Sounds like I'm gonna have to stick to what I'm already doing. Which seems to defeat the use os drum racks to some extent.

I allways ignore that timing and move the sample start in simpler until it sound right and then if required pull/push it in the piano roll. ms quite honestly mean bugger all to me in music terms. ms to me is about how far sound can travel in that time for spacial positioning (30 cm/ms), or phase correction between mics etc when again relying upon speed of sound and distance.

Have a look at grooves and in particular groove editing (drag groove into a midi track, edit, drag it back over the groove to replace it) and using the start control in simpler. You can easily zoom inside the sample in simpler to get this very precise - same way you zoom inside an audio clip. Sorry - hadnt clicked you were using pre-shifted vengeance claps etc - ask right question, you get the rigth answer etc

[3phase]

Hi

Up to now I have stuck each drum on a separate track, and used the Track Delay to shift hats and claps forward a few ms. It's vital to be able to do this quickly and precisely.

So why cant you do it with drum racks or Impulse?

If I change a pre-shifted clap I dont want to spend half trying to move the hits by hand on a grid that isn't even marked in ms.

How do other people go about all this business?

Am I missing something?

I would be happy to do it in the clip window if I knew exactly where -13ms was.



Is there a reason NOT to use Track Delay?

the track delays dont work when beeing in external sync...
another big flaw... as of cause the missing positioning help in the editors..

Its allways strange how raw ableton is doing theire initial implementations..and how long they stick with he involved flaws..

L4 was intrroducing midi without trackdelays but at least i got my upgrade money back because of this because without any type of compensation you really cant work with external hardware with live..
But how can you deliver such a thing in the first hand? does it really need user feedback to make proifessional developers aware of such things?


Sometimes you really get the idea that ableton is not really knowing what they are doing..but than.. how can this be?

must be a marketing cheme get more upgrade cycles.. L9 now with working midi ,,,something like that

[fl0w]

I use the method described by Angstrom but it's quickly boring and hinders experimentation IMO.
Keep this thread going!

[Khazul]

But if you do that in Simpler you are chopping off all the pre-clap sound which is the whole point of having them.

Yeh - forgot about the extra pre-noise - the odd times Ive used it, Ive loaded that into another simpler and triggered it separately after re-warping and consolidating it (depends which clap of course - Im assuming you mean those in VEH3?) so it grid aligns.

[Angstrom]

I did actually figure out a way to delay notes on a per-note basis, in midi, not audio. It's a bit daft, but possibly useful. Here is a very bad overview, because I am busy.

Note Selection
If you create a midi-rack, and two parallel chains, both with 'scale' Devices as the first device. The scale devices can be used to kill notes off, not just to re-pitch them. If you uncheck the note that corresponds to your hi-hat, for example then your hi-hat will be removed. Obviously these two chains, one of them is the 'delayed' note, the other is everything else.

in the delayed note section, deactivate everything but your delayed note. You can see this in the image below.

In the other chain, ONLY deactivate the note you want to delay. IE, the scale should be mostly blocks, with one missing. You can use the range settings to make sure these dont interefere with other drums.

Selective MIDI delay
Using two note length plugins gives us a MIDI delay, you set them up like this. So the first one has a 10% note-length to give us a 10% value of the time shift value shown. The second one is set to 'note off' so when the first one has played its 38.8ms long note, the second one will actually play the hi-hat (in this case) .




tldr; this rack will MIDI delay a specific drum by a variable amount. But it is a bit stupid, so probably academic interest only.

[mr.ergonomics]

yup I agree with the most posted here. I find it a bit strange that something simple like a midi sequencer is still so underdeveloped including the have backed groove quantise. it's nice but I'm missing things everytime I use it (delay and note length parameter or a negative groove value to mirror a groove in the opposite direction). there are too few new concepts. I would think that there is much much more useful features then at the moment. but even a midi sequencer like cubase is imho way to bulky.