ORIGINAL: pianodano
We would never have tolerated errors in timing of the sort I am dealing with now, to be introduced in the shows of old. Much less recordings. My brother and I (I'll just say he is a exceptionally talented drummer that can lock to the clock and not vary) used to argue over shifting latin percussion tracks 1 or 2 ticks behind the beat. That was when we used the MC500 for live work. If someone would like to do the math. Tempo around say 118, 4/4 time, 96ppqn. The difference should be noticeable to most musicans.

Yes, I agree. BTW - at 96ppqn, 2 ticks = 10ms.

That Tyros does sound interesting.

ORIGINAL: dewdman42

ORIGINAL: pianodano
We would never have tolerated errors in timing of the sort I am dealing with now, to be introduced in the shows of old. Much less recordings. My brother and I (I'll just say he is a exceptionally talented drummer that can lock to the clock and not vary) used to argue over shifting latin percussion tracks 1 or 2 ticks behind the beat. That was when we used the MC500 for live work. If someone would like to do the math. Tempo around say 118, 4/4 time, 96ppqn. The difference should be noticeable to most musicans.

Yes, I agree. BTW - at 96ppqn, 2 ticks = 10ms.

That Tyros does sound interesting.

Thanks for doing the math. Now if I could get my attempts to record stuff on the computer to land close to that consistently.

Lots of demos out there on the Tyros.

ORIGINAL: dewdman42
Did you disable the metronome? Still terrible? Which plugin you using for the bongos? can you render a wav file of the terrible result and post that along with the midi file?

Nope, no metronome was used. I was just pounding along to the other tracks. No plugin was involved. The midi was going back to the Fantom. I deleted that part but will try to duplicate it when I get a chance. Actually, maybe latency was part of the problem..

Did you already tell us which midi interface you're using to get to the fantom. One thing I would do when you're laying down the track is to not echo the midi back to the Fantom. Let the fantom make the sound directly in the keyboard as you're playing it...but send the midi to sonar and record it, but just monitor what you're playing without echoing through Sonar. Then of course, during playback it has to go to the fantom.

This is definitely one reason I am no longer using external synths

I used the Emu 1820m midi port on the dock. Yes, I'm directly monitoring the Fantom just recording the midi in Sonar. That's one advantage of using an external synth (zero audible latency while recording). Maybe that's part of the reason the playback doesn't sound quite right.

dewdman, That's what I do with my Vdrums. If I echo the midi back out, it feels "soft", "squishy" - but I think this is more due to the round trip latency than it is to jitter - it feels consistently like this, not with a variable amount of squishyness.

As far as the 10ms of timing - in a live show? really? I'd think that unless you are using in-ears, it would be a completely impossible feat - 1ms per foot away from the monitor - so say 6 feet to my ear from the monitor and I only get 4ms of playing slop. Seems a stretch. I mean, something like 100 ms+, like Church organists may have to deal with would feel sloppy to the player, but still probably feel fine for the audience.

I'm just not convinced that there are really THAT many amazing players out there like this - I think if we had the opportunity to look t the tapes of old studios the way we can critique the DATA we record now, we'd be pretty shocked at how out some stuff that we think sounds amazing really is.

Nonetheless - if it bugs you, it bugs you, right? I'm participating in this thread because I've been down this trail a number of times and no one has ever seemed to want to really get into a discussion without it turning into a mud slinging. I'm satisfied that there is a little "offness" in my recordings, but it is far "less off" than my own playing - I may play withint 15 ticks of the mark at 960, where the amount it seems to be off on my system is <4 ticks. A few ms. It does feel like it's a little better at a lower PPQ, but it could be my imaginaton - all the tests I've done seem to measure out "relatively" similar.

ORIGINAL: Blades


As far as the 10ms of timing - in a live show? really? I'd think that unless you are using in-ears, it would be a completely impossible feat - 1ms per foot away from the monitor - so say 6 feet to my ear from the monitor and I only get 4ms of playing slop. Seems a stretch. I mean, something like 100 ms+, like Church organists may have to deal with would feel sloppy to the player, but still probably feel fine for the audience.

Sorry. Of course we were using in ear click. I know of no other way for a drummer to accurately play to a sequencer. It seems as though you're just getting in the pocket and grooving. I was also shocked he (my brother) gave his V drums away and went back to his Vistalites

>> Tempo around say 118, 4/4 time, 96ppqn. The difference should be noticeable to most musicans.

At that tempo and ppqn, 1 tick is nearly 5.3 milliseconds. I'd agree that shifting one percussion part by 5 milliseconds, while leaving other parts unchanged, should be audible to most musicians who work with 'groove' oriented music.

Personally, I don't think 96 ppqn is anywhere near enough. However, I can understand preferring a rock-solid 96 ppqn to a jittery 960 ppqn.

Larry Fast (Synergy) reported working with some session drummers who could identify sub-millisecond timing differences: shift just a bit, and they said the groove wasn't in the pocket anymore. I don't remember the details (might have been in an interview with Wendy Carlos, who's worked with Larry) - but I think the drummers were pretty good at identifying the timing was off, even by that much.

- Jim

Humans are a pretty sophisticated build, right? So, I don't think it's impossible, but I don't think most people could tell, nor do I think in a blind test given a handful of samples, that even these guys could really identify the difference, but I'm probably wrong! .

An interesting thing I just looked up: the average time it takes to blink your eye is about 300-400ms. Audio Timing that can be identified at 1/300th of the blink of an eye would be a pretty miraculous feat, no? Sort of kidding, sort of serious.

Maybe I just suck.

I wasn't suggesting people could actually measure the timing shift by ear. After all, Haas effect kicks in around 30-40 milliseconds. And nobody can detect such subtle timing shifts in isolation. There are classic cognition experiments -- testing perception of isolated sounds occuring in sequence -- that have established that beyond any real doubt. (One such studyis : Michon, J. A. 1964. "Studies on subjective duration 1. Differential sensitivity on the perception of repeated temporal intervals." Acta Psychologica (22): 441-450.)

However, the drummers were not listening to individual sounds in isolation from all other sounds. Rather, they were listening to drum hits in the context of a solid groove, and noticing that if one (of many) concurrent parts was shifted just slightly - the groove didn't "feel right" any more. This is a totally different kind of listening experience, and people who generalize the "sounds in isolation" experiments to make statements about what people can detect when sounds are not heard in isolation - are making a fundamental error in reasoning.

So, what might the drummers be hearing? I don't know, frankly. I suspect it has to do with how the attacks of different percussion notes overlap and reinforce (or interfere with) each other, psychoacoustically. I believe that something is going on, in the complex web of sounds that make up a good groove, that tickles the human nervous system in good ways when the groove is really in the pocket, and in other ways when the groove isn't quite there. AFAIK, nobody has actually done any decent cognition experiments on what a trained listener can perceive w.r.t. timing skews in individual parts within a complex rhythmic construct. It's a lot easier to test the average joe (or jill), listening to two tones being played some number of milliseconds apart....

This is not the same thing, but -- it's well known that very small amounts of jitter in audio sample clocks have major effects on audio quality. To quote Bob Katz ("Mastering Audio", p. 228) ".. variations.. as small as 10 picoseconds may cause audible artifacts, depending on the quality of the reproduction system and your own hearing acuity." Bob spends a full chapter looking at the myths and realities of audio jitter; people spend serious money buying ultra-low-jitter DACs and ADCs - and I don't think they're wasting their money. Now, audio jitter and percussive-event jitter are not the same thing at all - and I believe they affect the human sensory apparatus in different ways. My point is just that human perception is surprisingly sensitive in a number of ways, and we don't know enough to say definitively what people can or cannot perceive, directly or indirectly.

Now, I am not suggesting that musicians can consciously control timing as finely as 10 picoseconds!! But, I do think a trained ensemble may somehow be able to create a groove where the parts are locked together with millisecond-level accuracy. Geoffrey Bilmes did a masters thesis on this at MIT (1993), where he worked with recordings of an Afro-Cuban percussion ensemble; the published data shows timing relationships that are accurate to somewhere below 5 milliseconds. (My statement is based on eyeballing some charts showing timing skew between parts -- the parts are pretty clearly locked together, with a ''timing skew' ceiling somewhere below 5 milliseconds. How far below? Not clear from the graphs, and I never saw the raw data). To me, Bilmes' work is suggestive, but not definitive.

One last point. My father-in-law was a machinist. He could tell how thick a piece of sheet metal stock was, to within one thousandth of an inch, without using calipers. I saw him do it many times. He couldn't tell you how he did it -but from long practice, he just knew. Could I do that? Not without 40 years of practice, making replacement parts for busted elevators. But he could.

- Jim