DJ Question: would a "nudge" or "brake"

ryansupak · Post by **ryansupak** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 7:27 pm

duh...you can put the simple delay in as an insert effect. OK, so not nearly as expensive now...

now, if somebody can clue me in on how to delay "forward in time", i'll be in pretty good shape as far as nudging and braking are concerned, but i'd still like pause and unpause or equivalent.

rs

ryansupak · Post by **ryansupak** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 7:40 pm

whoops, found another limitation of just braking with simple delay...nudging is still entirely impossible AFAIK.

if a beat is less than (1/16 measure - 1/48 measure) behind (most of the time it is) then it cannot be nudged, as the simple-delay doesn't alter more than 33.3% of its span.

the workaround here is to turn sync off and use flat millisecond amounts.

ryansupak · Post by **ryansupak** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 7:52 pm

i figured out how to do a facsimile of nudging, though it requires PD or some other fairly detailed midi control language:

whenever user presses nudge button, it imposes a delay of that amount on all other tracks instead of on the "nudged" track itself.

limitations:

* it might not "feel" quite right, since you were expecting to hear a nudge but instead you get a "group brake".

* you have to have every program track preconfigured in the system - no creatin new tracks on the fly.

* failure would happen if enough consecutive nudges were used so that the delay limit exceeds 300ms on any track (the limit of ableton simple-delay). i guess another delay could be used instead, but then resolution might be a problem. probably best to code up a simple delay in synthedit, etc just for the task.

bottom line:
it would be a whole lot nicer to have this built in as a feature.

furthermore, i can't think of any way to implement "pause/unpause" per-track that doesn't involve piping audio outside Ableton.

wow! im chatty today,
rs

ejectorset · Post by **ejectorset** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 8:06 pm

ryansupak wrote: now, if somebody can clue me in on how to delay "forward in time", i'll be in pretty good shape as far as nudging and braking are concerned, but i'd still like pause and unpause or equivalent.

rs

well my motto is "the answer is in the limitations" so the way I look at things if you can't use a delay to fix a track that is behind the beat, depending how how many tracks you have running at the same time (assuming you are "dj-ing" in live, not writing new material/doing complex live-PA) let's say one the answer is simple, nudge (delay trick) the track that is on time to match to the one that is running late.

If you had a couple of tracks playing and only one was late, yes it would be silly, but you could submix them down to 1 track that you could fix with a delay.

Yes, this simply postpones the problem of some of your stuff being off-time, but hey if you were using per-clip quatization you wouldn't be in this mess anyways.

If you want to hang certain tracks back in the mix, figure out which ones you like to hang a bit and build it into the clip warp start position or offset it so you can still launch the clip quantized but hang it back a bit. Or, you could always leave them warped perfectly and have launch quatization turned on and throw them through an un-synced delay that is 100% wet to hang them back in the mix a few milliseconds.

forge · Post by **forge** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 8:10 pm

there's been some good suggestions but personally I feel the point is to be able to advance or drag the track forward or back but keep the tempo where it is - so the delay idea would only be useful once - but the idea is to compensate for fluctuations in the vinyl which will keep happening

the best workaround I've heard so far is to work out what the maximum and minimum master tempo settings would need to be in order for the middle position of pitch bend to correspond to the tempo of your set - It might mean having a chart drawn up somewhere with the min/max values required for each tempo you want to use in case you want to change the overall tempo during the set

what would be cool is if you could have a latch button to make it so that if you push the pitch wheel forward what ever value you get to when you let go becomes the new tempo so you could kind of nudge and change the pitch setting at the same time which you would do with vinyl if you could hear it was slightly out

But the easiest way to do this would be to allow multiple midi ctrl assignments for tempo so you could assign the pitch wheel for nudge/brake and another circular knob to chenge the overall tempo - but it would need the option of changing the min/max settings with it so that the middle position of the pitch wheel would always be the master tempo

ejectorset · Post by **ejectorset** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 8:15 pm

I dunno, it seems to me that if you are really trying that hard to incorporate live into a turntable setup then the feature you really should be asking for is them to make it work with final scratch controlling it.

Then you would have the ultimate control surface controlling the tempo of your live set ... a turntable spinning a real record.

ryansupak · Post by **ryansupak** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 8:20 pm

i see your point, but then i get a whole new crop of other problems, when all i really want to be able to do is quickly time-correct a bad trigger

anyway, thanks for the thoughts,
rs

jethrosipho · Post by **jethrosipho** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 9:26 pm

you guys know about In Time? www.circular-logic.com

psilosly · Post by **psilosly** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 9:28 pm

Here's a possible solution for nudging/breaking individual tracks. Its actually a way of nudging/breaking individual clips, and it actually only works on looped clips. You can move the position of the start marker in the warp settings in real time and it will adjust the current play position in the loop to match these new settings. If you double the length of each of your loop clips you can put the start marker right in the middle. Then, with snap turned off, you can slightly adjust the position of the start marker forwards or back to execute nudges and breaks...

This would work for non-looped clips if we could have a start marker in them (I don't know why we can't, or maybe we can and I'm on crack.)

hope that helps.

matt ob · Post by **matt ob** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 10:31 pm

ejectorset wrote:
matt ob wrote:Why on earth would I want to start fucking around with the track that people are listening to?
dj's that use tables do this all the time, I always kinda thought it was the basis of dj-ing, otherwise if you are playing two records they just keep drifting further and further apart from being on time.

I think you'll find that DJ's amend the tempo of that track they are mixing in (the one that is heard through the headphones). Of course, once both tracks are in the mix then one, or both, may need to be adjusted occasionally. It makes little sense to adjust the tempo of the track playing through the PA in order to match it to the tempo of the track you are listening to through the headphones, which is what you are suggesting.

ejectorset · Post by **ejectorset** » Sat Oct 23, 2004 4:10 am

I am merely suggesting that if you can't drop a clip on the one when live has already been synced up/tap tempo'd and then nudge it using live's built in features within the next bar or so during cueing, then the easier fix would be to adjust the decks.

Adjusting the deck for a slight problem (early/late drop or +/- 0.30 or so BPM) after the drop would not be a problem for a dj that knows how to rock decks, nor should it be a problem for a seasoned dj to be able to learn to cue a track right in live then mix it into their set with maybe one or two nights practice at most.

DJ's have been integrating live succesfully into their sets right alongside turntables, cd decks, ipods, etc since version 1.

forge · Post by **forge** » Sat Oct 23, 2004 7:46 am

ejectorset wrote:I dunno, it seems to me that if you are really trying that hard to incorporate live into a turntable setup then the feature you really should be asking for is them to make it work with final scratch controlling it.

Then you would have the ultimate control surface controlling the tempo of your live set ... a turntable spinning a real record.

not really - for the sake of allowing 2 controller assignments to tempo it would make it ALOT easier to mix with vinyl - it's a simple request really and would make alot of people happy

ejectorset · Post by **ejectorset** » Sat Oct 23, 2004 8:10 pm

I already have 2 controls for tempo assigned to a physical knob.

A nice big one ... my powermate. All you have to do is assign up/down to when you rotate it and shift+up/down for when you click-rotate it and remember to click on the tempo in live to set it as the active control and you are all set. Come to think of it, I actually have a 3rd fine tune in that in my powermate control panel I can control the key repeat value and fine tune how fast it transmits both of the commands (individually for all 4 commands) as I turn the knob.

Maybe since I had already thought outside of the box and found a way to manage exactly what so many people are saying live can't do (with more precision than they are asking for) I didn't understand why anyone would need such a feature.

Actually, I still don't, since live already has at least 5 seperate tempo control methods with different amounts of control (some fine tunable) that I can think of built right in.

xeb · Post by **xeb** » Mon Oct 25, 2004 3:48 pm

ejectorset you clearly don't know shit about djing with vinyl... your suggestions of "why can't you adjust the turntable" are quite frankly useless. you can't understand why people want this feature because you don't want this feature. enough people do want it for a very good reason.... deal with it

ryansupak · Post by **ryansupak** » Mon Oct 25, 2004 4:59 pm

hi guys (gals?),

thanks again for all the responses. i tried out all the workarounds i could think of this weekend in the club (most gleaned from this thread), and they're definitely passable (especially the submix + delay +pd method).

nonetheless, for my part, i still conclude that this feature set would make life easier for anybody who ever triggers a few milliseconds off (like me)

rs