Timi ... ti min ... er timing?

[onefang]

If you read my intro post, you'll know that I haven't played an instrument for over four decades, when I used to play in high school bands and such. Now I've been relearning music and teaching myself MIDI keyboard, and all this fancy new music creation software that didn't exist four decades ago. So I'm working on a cover of Pink Floyd's "Set the controls for the heart of the sun".

My current problem is timing.

From web searches for scores and tabs and such, the ones I have found have the BPM set to anything from 110 to 126. I have tried some of the "tap to establish the BPM" things while listening to the various versions Pink Floyd made, and yep, they play somewhere between 110 and 126, sometimes during the same performance. Either that or these tap to BPM things are a bit variable, or more likely I am. So I went with 120 BPM at first.

While they all agree it's in 4/4 time, one of the guitar tabs has bars with 4 quarter notes AND an eight note. Sometimes.

If I recall correctly Pink Floyd is a bunch of architecture students, not trained musicians. I remember one of them saying that before Dark Side Of Moon they didn't even think they could sing, which explains the mumbled lyrics in Set the controls. They are great at jamming and tightly playing with each other, but maybe not so much at sticking precisely to one BPM in the early days. I suspect the whole "4/4 time maybe, 110 to 126 BPM perhaps" thing might be coz they didn't bother to write it down, and everyone else is having the same trouble as me figuring it out.

As a computer programmer for the last four decades I have trained myself to use my typing keyboard at speed and mostly accurate, coz I can always just go back and fix the typoes. Same goes for mouse clicks. Now I have to use my music keyboard at a set speed. I suspect muscle memory is getting in the way.

I figured out the main bass riff of this song by ear, and was only out by one note. Though there are different numbers of beats in the phrases of the verses.

One of my other posts was about the singing, since my singing voice is very rusty, so I got the computer to do the singing. Festival's singing mode was faster than the 120 BPM I told it to use once I had imported it into MuSE. Odd Voices at least agreed with MusE. Next step was to match my keyboard playing with the singing. Nope, I'm playing too fast. lol

I did try playing along with one of their performances, but I need way more practice. lol

Alas just changing the BPM in MusE isn't that easy, since I have to regenerate the singing, which has to be done with separate projects per verse / chorus / etc. coz of my previously mentioned "MusE can't export MIDI for just one track of multi track project", which at least the devs said they'll fix soon.

I want to have some of this cover actually played by me, but it would be a lot easier just to click into the piano roll and edit it to precise timing. Then the robot singing will be matched by the robot playing. lol

Is there any open source Linux software that can help me practice timing? I initially tried Pianobooster, but it sucks at reviewing your performance.

Any other ideas?

[onefang]

I'm gonna try it at 128 BPM, coz I'm a programmer and powers of 2 appeal to me. If that doesn't work out, I'll just do the mouse clicky robot playing thing for now.

[onefang]

That took forever. After changing the tempo to 128 I had to recreate the singing (loading each lyric parts separate project, changing the tempo, exporting, then letting OddVoices loose), replace the singing parts with the new audio, edit all the audio parts and automation points to match the new timing. Not to mention swearing every time I forgot to deselect all when switching from dragging automation points to dragging audio parts, coz otherwise you end up dragging both. Naturally I tripped the "doesn't like symlinks in the path" bug that is documented on github.

Gonna take a rest now, then see if I can actually play it at 128 BPM.

[tseaver]

@onefang I feel your pain.

The chance that any "classic rock" band (i.e., recorded prior to the dawn of the DAW era, c. 1993) will play to a consistent BPM across a whole song is minimal: they were typically recorded playing together as a band (for at least most of the parts), where the push-and-pull between the players, particularly the rhythm section, was an important part of the feel / groove of the song. Playing "to the grid" (e.g., with a metronome click in the drummer's cans, and everybody else recorded after the drums) was not a goal in those days.

A first-order approximation is to find each bar where the BPM shifts, and add a different BPM / tempor marker (likeliest at the start of a verse or chorus, but could be anywhere). If that isn't fine-grained enough, then you might be able to add some form of what Ardour calls "tempo ramping", shifting between BPMs gradually over a span of time.

[folderol]

Hmmm, personally I very rarely use a fixed BPM - especially where improvs are concerned. The 'life' is in the variations.
On the occasions where it is appropriate, I start with a very simple drum track (I absolutely refuse to try to play to a click).

[tseaver]

@folderol

(I absolutely refuse to try to play to a click).

Yup, me too: I acquired a hatred for metronomes over a half-century ago, and have never felt inclined to overcome it.

I will admit that for ease-of-editing, I tend to quantize the MIDI drum patterns I use in place of a click (the kick and snare, at least: leaving some wiggle room in the hi-hat / ride seems to help the track breathe more freely). I still recall an extended conversation at a summer blues music camp where my classically-trained interlocutor tried to insist that "swing feel" was "just" always eighth- or sixteenth-note triplets. I could trivially demonstrate otherwise, just by playing MP3s from the classic N'Awlins / Memphis / Piedmont blues tunes we were there to study. I didn't even need to kick down to Afro-Cuban or Brazilian jazz tunes to make my point.

I find it particularly amusing that the classical players I know (all of whom have better reading / ensemble playing chops than I ever hope to attain) are the very ones whose training exercises so often focus on the metronome: they are the same players who, at their best, are playing together from a human-originated, visual tempo cue (the conductor's baton), which often varies by intent over the course of a piece / movement: about as far as one can get from the robotic metronome.

[onefang]

When I was last playing music in the 60s and 70s it was usually with a music teacher as the conductor. I suspect they would have tried to stick to a steady beat so the students wouldn't have any trouble keeping up with fancy timing shenanigans.

Now I'm relearning music decades later, starting with the basics, setting one BPM in a DAW while I stumble through learning this new instrument, and lacking a teacher conductor like I was used to. A metronome might help.