by Vijith

I'm having to start from scratch with a lot of workflow issues after jumping ship from Digital Performer to Logic, and during a project I worked on last week, I was forced to re-learn an old trick that's definitely worth passing along here.

In part because I use a lot of MIDI, I generally try to adhere to a click track unless there's an artistic reason to drift -- rubato, and even rushing, have their uses, but I've always felt strongly that DAW-based composition gets much easier when you can visually see and edit the relationships between beats, bars, and whatever musical content you've input, and -- not insignificant, this part -- snap your musical phrases around in musically useful increments. Trying to slide a keyboard riff back by one bar comes much more naturally than trying to move it back by 191,387 samples, and having to calculate the latter every time you want to move something around is, in my opinion, one of the quickest ways to kill a productivity buzz.

Where I depart from a lot of people, I think, is that I think this same reasoning also extends from matters of composition and arrangement and into production. Delays and modulation effects, in particular, can be incredibly effective when anchored to the tempo of the piece, and even compressors can be made to pump in and out in musically useful ways (though you'll rarely see any sort of beat-oriented controls on those plugins). This means that I can quickly turn quite surly when I have to calculate millisecond values in order to get a basic quarter-note delay or swirl a flanger around symmetrically on every bar -- again, it always feels like I'm screeching to a standstill to address some stupid procedural hangup (not unlike doing excessive paperwork, actually).

Most people, particularly when focused exclusively on mixing, don't seem to worry about this -- in fact, I'd wager that an overwhelming majority of the Pro Tools session documents in the world have the metronome set to the default 120 BPM no matter what they actually contain. I've heard arguments that unpredictable tempo asymmetries can make the effects more interesting, and also that locking things in too tightly makes it easier to forget that such details are usually just meant to be frosting. Both are valid points, but I'm not convinced, because if you want the asymmetry, you can always flip your plugin back into millisecond mode. Properly placed beat and bar reference points give you a very powerful new way of addressing your time-oriented production effects, but there's nothing forcing you to use it.

The obvious problem here: playing to a metronome is hard! And even assuming that I've already won you over here, if any of the material is tracked without you around to play resident click stickler, chances are this line of reasoning will be dispensed with, and the project tempo will be set to that dreaded 120.00 when you see it next.

There's a really elegant solution to this with most major DAW platforms, though. No, not yelling at your drummer, although there's often a reason for that too, in which case, have at it, Cowboy.

Rather, you can retroactively move the beat and bar lines of the metronome's "grid" around to match up the musical content in the audio recordings. Thus, it's not actually a grid at all in the end, instead pulsing subtly over the course of the session to match up with the musician's natural pacing. Or even wildly, for that matter -- who cares? I just want to beat-sync my plugins, remember, so if the wildly fluctuating tempos (rubato, incompetent, whatever) are considered acceptable at this point, my cognitive flow has been restored and we can move on.

This is not beat slicing or quantization or Live Warping or time stretching or any number of other terms that might have just jumped to mind. Most of those processes are ways of conforming deviating performances to a rigid tempo grid. Here, we're conforming the grid to the performance, and through it all, the audio is absolutely untouched (for better or worse).

In order to set up your sequence for this, you'll have to do a bit of prep (which I must sheepishly admit might feel a bit like doing paperwork) but for me the payoff comes in never having to stop making music to switch to a calculator.

Platform-specific:
Logic
Digital Performer
Pro Tools
Cubase

So I've spent most of my free time for the last couple nights tweaking the integration of my keyboard with Logic, and while that certainly may be pathetic, it's not as monumentally so as you might think at first. Said keyboard is  one of the formidable Novation ReMOTE SLs, which means there's a diverse array of built-in knobs, faders, buttons, drum pads, a joystick, and even an X-Y touchpad much like you'd find on a laptop. That in turn means it's actually a fairly intricate piece of hardware to interface with, and even though there are backlit LED scribble strips with which the functions of each bit can be labeled, at the setup stage that's just one more thing you have to program before you can start making music.

Novation, to their credit, foresaw this problem back when they were designing them, hence the Automap host software, which essentially wraps around your plugins and automatically assigns their parameters to the MIDI messages the keyboard is sending. In practical terms, this means that as soon as you click on, say, a delay plugin, the extra controls on the keyboard are properly labeled and ready to do something useful. Cool, huh? (When it's all working properly, at least, which mine is not, though at this stage in the troubleshooting process I must sheepishly admit that the problems I'm having are probably my fault rather than the keyboard's.)

Bypassing all the hair-yanking buggery for the moment (thank goodness -- I could use a break), I'm also looking forward to their next release: an Automap iPhone App. I just searched the App Store a moment ago and couldn't find it, but basically it's going to give you unlimited pages of two faders and eight buttons apiece, all of which do the aforementioned intelligent mapping. There's really no reason for that to be the only control configuration, though, and one hopes that Novation will make additional interfaces available later (I realize that's a big fat "if" once they already have your money) or even allow you to create your own, at which point it could basically become a poor man's Lemur.

I'll be keeping my other MIDI controllers, obviously, but as a secondary way to actually touch the music, I think this is a really cool use for a device which otherwise would just be at best sitting silently in its charging dock, and at worst ringing just in time to ruin a take. If you don't have a Novation keyboard, you're in luck, in a way (beyond the troubleshooting, I mean) -- in order to use multiple Automap devices, you have to shell out for the pro version of the host software, at a cost of about $30. I'm assuming you'll be able to toggle between active devices, but even though that's pretty steep for what is essentially a glorified MIDI driver, I could probably be talked into shelling out if all the flipping back and forth gets to be sufficiently intrusive.

So that then brought to mind another cool DAW gizmo integration tidbit. We're in the throes of hype over Apple's recent release of Logic 9, but one of the oft-forgotten capabilities added in the similarly epic upgrade to version 8 back in late 2007 was the ability to use the little white Apple remotes as transport controls. You know, these guys:

For those who still don't know what I'm talking about, it's a little wireless infrared device about the size of a pack of gum which has been included with most Macs for the past few years in an attempt to make media playback programs like Front Row and iTunes more comfortable for living room use. (Mac Pro users, you're out of luck, as you don't get the remote, nor do you even have an IR port with which to use one if you were to spend the a la carte $29.) Since they're included with several different Apple devices (iPod docks, for example, which you already know I have), I actually have a couple of these things lying around, and Logic can use them out of the box with no configuration necessary. The up and down buttons map to track select and record arming, forward and rewind scroll through the timeline (including larger jumps if you hold them down), "Menu" starts recording, and Ima smack you if you can't figure out what Play/Pause does.

This is totally awesome as a poor man's Tranzport -- which, to Frontier Design's credit, is far more robust, includes an informative LCD which even does live input metering, probably has a larger wireless range, and works with hosts other than Logic. Unfortunately, it'll also set you back three figures. In this economy, I'd rather save that money for rent, taxes, groceries, and rainy days. And maybe Automap Pro.