Doggiebox February 2005

doggiebox@lists.zygoat.ca

17 participants
33 discussions

Re: relevance of time signatures
by Dan Costello 13 Feb '05

13 Feb '05

Adrian wrote: > ...I do find a maximum of 48 a little limiting, for writing e.g. flams > or grace notes or buzzes. (Only David's excellent Ludwig kit provides > flams and buzzes.) Ah-ha. Now I understand. Especially if it's a slow piece, and you need to approximate a roll or flam or something. That totally makes sense to me. And I agree to a certain point-- although, yes, David's addition of those actual motions on a drum kit are so much more realistic than anything you could get by stacking up individual drum sounds. I've done some fairly complex fills with other kits, but have avoided rolls altogether, unless I'm using the Ludwig kit. ;-) Sterling wrote: > Also, there are numerous ethnic-dance meters in which, for example, > bars of four slow beats alternate with bars of three quick beats. In > such cases, as Adrian suggests, things could still be handled just by > setting different TEMPOS for the quick-beat bars, cumbersome though it > may be to keep shifting tempos and display resolutions. But it's still > nice to have the convention of /4 and /8 time-signatures to play with > in expressing these relationships, in which the actual tempo really > doesn't change at all. That last sentence is it exactly. Even in the most bizarre African, Caribbean, Indian, Javanese, etc. rhythms, those cultures still almost always a basic unit. It's like the smallest Lego block. Even though most of the time you're using the 2x4 blocks to build and create with, you can still look at those as eight little 1x1 blocks. (ex. two groups of three 1x1 blocks, and one group of two 1x1 blocks... or you could separate out just one 1x1 block to use as a spacer, to construct "non-traditionally" or "asymmetrically.") So even though those beats seem "slow" or "fast," it can still be expressed most accurately and consistently in standard western rhythmic notation. About two months ago I attended a master class with Sandip Burman, the world-renowned Indian tablas player. He was working on a new rhythm that he had developed as longer phrases all tacked together (which he referred to as his new "13 and 3 quarters" rhythm), but to be able to share it with us, we all helped break it down entirely into groupings of a single unit. Even though it had sections that felt totally free of any consistent structure, we worked it all out, section by section, so that each section could be expressed in groupings of that smallest single unit. There were three sets of 6 beats (that felt like 6/8, with emph. on 1 and 4), a set of 4 beats (with emph. on 1 and 3), then a group of 5 beats, then the 4-beat set again, then a group of 7 followed by the 4-beat set, then a group of 9 beats followed by a different set of 4 beats with a rest on 1, and accents on 2, 3 and 4. So: (6 + 6 + 6) + 4 + 5 + 4 + 7 + 4 + 9 + 4 = 55 55/4 = 13 3/4 And when it gets going fast, of course you're not counting up to 55 each phrase; you focus on the accents. Just like if I were to write this out, or build it into DB-- I don't want to have to count up to 55 every time, but that's essentially what I'd be doing if I didn't have some sort of subdivision, and a way to express WHERE the ACCENTS are. That's what different meters are all about-- even though a 3/4 and 6/8 measure take up the same space in time at equivalent tempos, the accents are different. Just having "six squares per bar" isn't going to describe that. Sorry this got so long... hope some of you enjoy it. I'll submit Sandip's rhythm (for use with the tablas kit) to the DB repository so you can hear it. Strictly for educational purposes, though, right guys? Cheers Dan

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Hello All
by Scott Kerr 13 Feb '05

13 Feb '05

hey there, I'm new to the list, just thought I'd say hello. So far, so good since I bought Doggiebox. I'm extremely happy with it, BUT... lol I have a question or 2; Any Ideas on 1/4 note triplets, or do you do it the 'hard' way and create an odd-time measure with a different tempo to approximate it? Also, how about other odd-time groupings like 5:4, 7:4, etc... Does one pretty much do the same thing? Last Question, anyone have any ideas on approximating a 'swung' feel? At any rate, here's my site, http://www.guitarius.net and in particular, here's my link to my newest tunes (2005) All done with doggiebox, so check it out, and lemme know what you think... http://homepage.mac.com/scottkerr1/FileSharing6.html Thanks for your time, happy drumming...

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Tested Amplitube- not sure I like it- Ludwig Kit used
by Mike 13 Feb '05

13 Feb '05

I tried my first recording using David H's Ludwig II kit. I really like it. His description of the Bonham-ish sound really rings true on the crashes. I don't know what it is. A compressed sound, maybe? Listen to the ride passage and the fill at around 1:00 into the song below. Pretty cool, if I do say so myself! I also used 1K's Amplitube for the guitar work. It belongs to a friend. I think I'll pass on the purchase. It's pretty cool, but it's a fairly big hassle to post-process the raw sounds as opposed to just micing my Studio 15. Thanks for listening. http://webpages.charter.net/mcarlyle/sounds/mttest.mp3 __________________________ Mike Carlyle Wilbraham, Massachusetts USA

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Re: Design challenges with beat-level editing
by Sterling Beckwith 12 Feb '05

12 Feb '05

Carl makes an even clearer case for what looks like the same sort of solution I spoke to earlier, by advocating a systematic distinction between paste operations that OVERWRITE, and those that REPLACE the hits in the selected target area. His analogy with text-processing seems to me to make sense here. Ben's point about "meaningless" time-signatures is a subtle one. ("Just gimme a 4/4 beat" is fine for lots of people, but any killer notation-based software package today has got to accommodate new-music composers and tala vidwans as well as jammers!) If, for example, you decide that two consecutive 4-beat bars should really be rewritten as 1 bar of 3 beats followed by one of 5, there's probably no easy way to do this now, i.e. to REBAR the grid leaving the hits unchanged. Pattern-based editing should make things like this much neater and simpler to do. Also, there are numerous ethnic-dance meters in which, for example, bars of four slow beats alternate with bars of three quick beats. In such cases, as Adrian suggests, things could still be handled just by setting different TEMPOS for the quick-beat bars, cumbersome though it may be to keep shifting tempos and display resolutions. But it's still nice to have the convention of /4 and /8 time-signatures to play with in expressing these relationships, in which the actual tempo really doesn't change at all. My hunch would be: Press on to complete the implementation of pattern-based editing, and then let's see what actual problems arise. The CMN-time-signatures-vs.-number-of-beats-per-bar problem is already half resolved anyway in DB, since resolutions are expressed only in number of subdivisions per beat, not in CMN-based fractions. And the grid itself is clearly beat-based. So maybe a wholly consistent labeling system isn't so important now. -Sterling

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relevance of time signatures
by Dan Costello 12 Feb '05

12 Feb '05

For those users like myself that DO read/write standard notation, and try to include DB into that context, it'd be a shame to not use time signatures. I'd probably look for a different sequencer. With the current version of DB, you can still doodle all you want, knowing nothing about time signatures and music structures. I don't see how the time signatures get in the way. And to suggest to a serious composer or recording artist to just "stick two 4/4 bars together and change the tempo to mimmick 5/4" is completely ridiculous. (No offense intended at all, Adrian... I just got a good laugh out of that.) Actually another thing Adrian said struck me as a little odd-- a request to add more subdivisions of each beat. THIS is where a tempo change, and an understanding of time sigs, would apply. In standard notation it is EXTREMELY rare to find anything smaller than a 64th note. Even in very fast and complex Indian tabla rhythms, each beat rarely gets subdivided smaller than that. They just change the time signature. And one last thing-- 6/8 is different than 3/4, which is different than 12/16. At least to someone that's reading it from a sheet of music. If I already have something written for which I want to use DB to build a drum track, and which shifts between the feel of 6/8 and the feel of 3/4, I want to see that on the screen in DB-- I don't want to have to guess which section I'm in by looking at where the snare is in that measure. So, I vote for keeping time signatures. Thanks, DC

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Design challenges with beat-level editing
by Ben Kennedy 11 Feb '05

11 Feb '05

Folks, I have been mulling over some design issues for some time now and I would like your feedback. As you can tell from the latest builds, the UI is getting to the point where it is possible to select beats and sub-beats, as well as entire bars or parts thereof, for editing operations. In Doggiebox 1.2 it is only possible to copy and paste whole bars; in this next version the goal is for copying to be possible on a more granular level. However, I am now faced with how to devise a UI that best works to achieve what we want, and there are a few subtle problems that need to be solved. Copying and pasting whole bars is trivial because any given bar either exists or it doesn't, and they can be shuffled around or removed and created like tiles on a tabletop. But once you get to manipulating beats WITHIN those bars, some challenges arise. For example, say you have a 4|4 bar expanded such that there are 8 total beat subdivisions visible (two per beat). In the current builds, you can select one of these beat subdivisions by clicking in the header with the "triangle" cursor. The question is, what should happen if you then perform a Cut? Setting that aside for a moment, say you instead select two adjacent beat subdivisions which account for one whole beat of the bar. Conceivably, performing a cut could remove the beat, turning it into a 3|4 bar. The copied beat could then be pasted anywhere else, say into another 4|4 bar, causing it to become a 5|4 bar. No problem. The conundrum is with sub-beat portions. In the first scenario, removing that subdivision would effectively pull an eighth note from the bar; should the 4|4 turn into a 7|8? Maybe... but what if, instead of being zoomed to two subdivisions per beat, we were zoomed in one more level so as to show triplets for each beat? The concept of removing one such subdivsion now becomes more complicated. I can see two approaches to this problem. One would be to restrict beat-level selection to whole beats only, rather than any arbitrary subdivisions as is possible in current builds. This would eliminate the geometry issue but would forego a lot of flexibility, kind of defeating part of the whole goal of more versatile editing. Another is to change the semantics of the Cut behaviour so that instead of actually removing beats, it merely removes the drums that exist in the selected space (preserving the structure/time characteristics of the bar). Paste would then similarly "paste into the space" without adding any new time or beats to the bar(s) under the cursor. We would create separate commands for adding/removing beats. To me, it seems that while each of these approaches has its benefits neither fully cuts the mustard by itself. For example, with the latter design, it would no longer be possible to delete a bar without using a secondary command. Perhaps a third approach would be to have two sets of editing commands, Copy/Paste Beats and Copy/Paste Drums, which would behave each of these ways respectively. This strikes me as dangerously obscure however. Whaddyall think? Ideas, feedback? -ben -- Ben Kennedy, chief magician zygoat creative technical services 613-228-3392 | 1-866-466-4628 http://www.zygoat.ca

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Creating kits question
by adrian.delso＠btopenworld.com 11 Feb '05

11 Feb '05

On a coverdisk off a magazine (Digital Music Maker # 8) is a bunch of royalty-free drum samples. I am currently constructing a kit, using them all (about 170 samples), and it's huge - 86mb. Obviously, I won't be submitting it to the db library! I will however use it, as is, until I'm really familiar with it and then discard the samples I never use (I still have the CD, after all.) My question is: what is a sensible number of variants? This set has e.g. ten different woodblock hits and 31 different kicks! I'm thinking three velocities per instrument - Hard, Medium and Light, plus things like a rimshot or two, separate Bell and Edge for Rides. It doesn't feature flams nor buzzes, like David's excellent Ludwig set, which is a shame. I suppose I could import them from David's kit, if that's OK. Subsidiary question: what's the difference between Accent, Default & Ghost and Hard, Medium & Light? (This is only really an issue, if I do decide to post the kit to the Library for approval.) Adrian

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Relevance of time signature?
by Ben Kennedy 11 Feb '05

11 Feb '05

I have another question for you. How important is the time signature functionality in Doggiebox? Does anyone use anything besides a 4-based meter (e.g. 6|8, 2|2, etc.)? Some discussions I've had on a few occasions have led me to start questioning the utility or wisdom in sticking with this western-music idiom. When I started out, I thought it would be clever and useful to give Doggiebox an awareness of real-world musical concepts (a little smarter than other drum machines). In practice however -- aside from identifying the number of beats in the bar -- the time signature does not serve much purpose in the Doggiebox UI other than pretty looks. In light of the geometry and editing issues I raised in the previous message, I'm wondering if it would be advisable to drop the distinction of time signature in favour of a more rudimentary "just how many beats in the bar". Feedback? -ben -- Ben Kennedy, chief magician zygoat creative technical services 613-228-3392 | 1-866-466-4628 http://www.zygoat.ca

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1E7 posted
by Ben Kennedy 11 Feb '05

11 Feb '05

Hey all, A new build is up at <http://www.doggiebox.com/distribution/Doggiebox- 1E7.tbz>. What's new: • Fixed the immensely frustrating bug introduced in the last build where drums would be put in the wrong places, seemingly at ranodm, when clicking in the pattern editor. • A temporary "Patrickcarl" diagnostic message now replaces the last build's "Carlpatrick" warning, which was not working as intended. This time, any null drum events will be replaced with a temporary unnamed drum which you will then be forced to reconcile to an existing drum. Please report if you see this alert message -- particularly if you find it recurring on any existing songs (after seeing it once) or on any new songs created with this or later builds. • New triangle (beat selection) and i-beam mouse cursors, as well as improved insertion point/selection handling in the pattern editor. -ben -- Ben Kennedy, chief magician zygoat creative technical services 613-228-3392 | 1-866-466-4628 http://www.zygoat.ca

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Re: Design challenges with beat-level editing
by Sterling Beckwith 11 Feb '05

11 Feb '05

Hard to resist this kind of challenge, though finding the right way forward won't be easy. Here's my very preliminary two cents worth. DB already distinguishes between adding BARS (initially blank) and composing DRUMS to occupy those bars. So it's no great stretch to extend this distinction a bit further with some new editing commands. Then how about this? 1) Making CUT/PASTE clearly and solely apply to DRUMS, with no effect on the underlying metric space. I assume that the pasted DRUMS would be automatically superimposed on anything already occupying that space. 2) Adding to the existing INSERT BARS command, two new commands that would ONLY affect the metric grid: DELETE BARS, and DELETE BEATS. You could always, I guess, add COPY SELECTION and REPLACE SELECTION as new editing commands that would grab and transport the whole selection complete with its grid. But it seems somehow cleaner to keep the grid and the pattern as two distinct entities, even if that slows down the editing process somewhat. Actually, I'm not so sure a DELETE BEATS command is really needed. Maybe DELETE SELECTION could do it all, or maybe just DELETE BARS would even suffice. Right now, you can already change the number of beats in any bar, just by changing its time signature, and you can add or insert a bar with any desired number of beats anywhere you want. Being able to delete or insert selected bars from the grid might well be enough, as long as segments of notated drumming can be cut or copied and pasted in anywhere on the existing metric grid. Should it be possible to delete from the grid at LOWER than the beat level? I doubt it. As for cutting and pasting where the item selected is at a higher RESOLUTION metrically than the context into which it is pasted, this might someday be handled by making any bar into which a new pattern has been pasted expand itself automatically to display at the higher resolution of the two. Ideally, the same resolution should always apply to the whole bar, in any case. These are exciting times for Doggiebox. Am eager to see what others think. -Sterling

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Doggiebox February 2005