comparing midi tracks in sequencers

Most sequencers these days display midi or note data in 'piano roll' format, with notes up the side and time running horizontally. I spend most of my music-making time fiddling with sets of notes on the piano roll, and I've come to realise that there is a very important feature that a lot of piano roll sequencers don't have.

Read on ...Imagine that you have two tracks of note data, one that is driving a lead synth and one that is driving a bassline synth. If you are editing the notes for the lead synth, it would be very useful to also display and edit the notes for the bassline synth at the same time. To do that, you need a sequencer that can display two or more piano-roll tracks of midi/note data at the same time and let you edit them. Ideally they should be vertically stacked on top of each other, with the same timescale so that you can easily see which notes coincide.

Some sequencers just can't do this at all. Some can do it, but only if you position the windows yourself and get all the scales right. Some can do it very well, with lots of good features.

The other alternative, of course, is to keep flicking between the two tracks, while remembering that you changed an F# to a D and a C to an A#, and then trying to do something musically equivalent in the other track. The more I think about it, the more it seems that 'multiple piano roll editing' (lets call it) is a fundamentally important feature if you compose music inside a sequencer.

So here's a quick survey of some sequencers I have investigated or that people have told me about:

Reason

Reason can't do it. It only displays one piano roll at a time, so you have to flick back and forth.

Ableton Live

Ableton can't do it. It also only displays one piano roll at a time.

Reaper

Reaper is a very competent shareware sequencer. It is noted for its unlimited free fully featured evaluation period. In Reaper you can open multiple piano-roll editors at the same time, and if you position the windows correctly you can get the desired 'stacking' of piano rolls.

Reaper can also ReWire to Reason or Ableton, which makes it very useful.

EnergyXT2

EnergyXT2 is an efficient little sequencer that can be downloaded for 50 euros. In the 'track view' mode of the main sequencer, you can activate a mini piano roll for each midi track. See the picture opposite for a screenshot. You can also bring up a larger piano roll window for one track at a time if you need to. Alas, EnergyXT does not have ReWire support.

Synapse Orion

Orion is another sequencer that I had never heard of until I started looking into this topic. A full version can be downloaded for $150 and it can display multiple piano roll windows at the same time. Like Reaper, you have to position the windows and set the timescale yourself. Orion also supports ReWire.

Cubase

As might be expected for such a long running piece of software, Cubase has good support for 'multiple piano roll editing'. The main sequencer window can show mini piano-roll editors for each midi track if you press the appropriate button (see picture).

Cubase can also let you edit multiple tracks in a single piano roll window, by drawing the notes in different colours and letting you switch between them. That is, the different bits of midi data are all overlaid on the same piano roll using different colours. Cubase calls this Multi-Part Editing and you can read a description of how to do it on this steinbergusers page.

Logic

Logic also goes back a long way, and apparently has good support for this, although I don't have any screen shots. I am told that Logic will allow you to open multiple piano-roll windows. It also has a Multi-Part Edit feature similar to Cubase's, in which multiple tracks are overlaid on the same piano roll in different colours.

Other Alternatives

Another way to get around this problem is stop using piano rolls altogether:

Some sequencers have score editors which show multiple tracks. If you are familiar with musical notation, that can be a very efficient way to edit multiple tracks. Cubase and Logic both have score editors.

Trackers have a completely different approach to sequencing, and people that use them often swear by them. They certainly let you view and edit multiple tracks at once, but you have to work with the raw note data (C5, D#6 etc) rather than with a visual diagram.

black holes

After the tributes to Deep Sea Creatures and Beards, the latest themed compilation to emerge from the watmm-ekt forums is Futonic's IDM Tribute to Black Holes:


Black Holes by Various Artists

Ten tracks on a free download from Futonic Records, featuring Alban Arthuan, Dead Eros, Tenfingers, Chris Moss Acid, Cubus, Asymmetrical Head, Choleric Productions, Lucid Rhythms, AD and Beneboi.

Its a great compilation, ranging from bleepy electronica, through layered guitar soundscapes and acid workouts to dubby space funk.

My submission didn't get picked for the compilation, but I'm still pretty happy with it. Here it is:

magnetospheric eternally collapsing object   3:13



download mp3   6054 kB

The existence of black holes in our universe is taken for granted these days, but it turns out that they might not actually exist after all - some boffins looked at the equations again and came to the conclusion that the trapped radiation pressure of the collapsing object would prevent it from forming a singularity. Instead the Magnetospheric Eternally Collapsing Object slowly, asymptotically collapses towards the black hole state, but never reaches it because it burns all its matter in the process. Also, it seems that viewed externally, such objects would appear to burn and collapse forever, because of spacetime shenanigans or something.

So this track tries to conjure up a huge, bright, fiery, spinning, eternally collapsing ball of supercompressed matter, pleasantly set against a surrounding starscape.

symbiosis sound environments vol 1

Net Labels are cool, but its still hard to beat a good old fashioned CD. One of my friends has recently put out a joint CD release with a couple of other musicians, so here's a plug for it:

Symbiosis Sound Environments Vol 1

Tracklisting:

01 - The New World - Dr Z
02 - Prosumer - Mulefa
03 - Zamami - Somacoma
04 - Entropy - A Million Little Lies
05 - Hug Your Joy - Somacoma (bonus track)

The Dr Z track is worth the price alone - its an impeccably-produced chilled out rhodes and flute workout over a backing of smooth bass and dreamy delay synths. The Mulefa and Somacoma tracks are old-school analog-based electronica, and the track by A Million Little Lies is a multi-layered downbeat affair with wailing guitars drifting past in the background.

You can hear samples over at the myspace page. There is a 12 inch available from ifmusic and the CD (with cool artwork on 100% recycled packaging) can be found in independent music stores in London and probably other places too. Also, MP3 downloads are available from TuneTribe.

losing it with replay gain

I had a baffling few hours the other day, when an mp3 version of one of my tracks turned out to be quieter than I had thought it was. I ran the original WAV through a maximizer to add on a few db, then converted to mp3 again, tagged it, and it still sounded too quiet ...

Eventually I realised it was nothing to do with the source WAV, and that Replay Gain was the culprit. Replay Gain is an admirable attempt to tackle the problem of the different perceived loudness in mp3s from different sources. It is basically an algorithm to estimate the perceived loudness of a track, and then store an offset against a reference level in the track meta-data. Its a big improvement on the awful peak normalisation that some mp3 players were attempting a few years ago, but its still not perfect.

The problem I had was that I was using MediaMonkey to sort out my mp3 tags and add album art. However, unbeknownst to me, MediaMonkey was calculating the Replay Gain of my tracks and writing it to the meta-data each time I edited the tags. Then when I played them back using Foobar2000, suddenly almost 10db was being taken off because Foobar was reading the Replay Gain tags.

When you make your own music, you go to considerable trouble to master the tracks to get the perceived loudness to the level that you want. You dont really want some little algorithm suddenly sneaking in and resetting the levels. Admittedly, Replay Gain only adds meta-data and doesn't actually touch the music, but when its all done without your consent and then your mp3 player honours the Replay Gain tags without you realising, its equivalent to someone sneaking into your studio and messing around with the master volume knob while you're looking the other way.

Perhaps I was particularly unlucky in this case because my noisy track was getting given a Replay Gain of -9.5 db, a massive difference.

MediaMonkey is a pretty useful tool, even in its Free version, but I couldn't find any options in it to turn off the Replay Gain interference. Basically, any mp3 tag editing resulted in Replay Gain being slapped on the track.

Luckily, Foobar2000 came to the rescue. When you right-click on a track in Foobar, there is a Replay Gain option in the menu. This gives you further options to display, edit or remove the Replay Gain settings.

Using this I was able to clean out the unwanted Replay Gain meta-data that had sneaked in. I also experimented with setting the Replay Gain to 0.0 or -0.l db to see if that stopped MediaMonkey from interfering, but it didn't. However I cleared or set the Replay Gain, MediaMonkey would re-set it to its own calculated value on every tag edit.

fathoming musical patterns

In Douglas Adams' 1987 book "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency", one of the characters is researching how natural patterns of numbers can be turned into music, and writes this article for "Fathom", a fictitous magazine:

    Mathematical analysis and computer modelling are revealing to us that the shapes and processes we encounter in nature - the way that plants grow, the way that mountains erode or rivers flow, the way that snowflakes or islands achieve their shapes, the way that light plays on a surface, the way the milk folds and spins into your coffee as you stir it, the way that laughter sweeps through a crowd of people - all these things in their seemingly magical complexity can be described by the interaction of mathematical processes that are, if anything, even more magical in their simplicity.
    Shapes that we think of as random are in fact the products of complex shifting webs of numbers obeying simple rules. The very word "natural" that we have often taken to mean "unstructured" in fact describes shapes and processes that appear so unfathomably complex that we cannot consciously perceive the simple natural laws at work.
    They can all be described by numbers.
    We know, however, that the mind is capable of understanding these matters in all their complexity and in all their simplicity. A ball flying through the air is responding to the force and direction with which it was thrown, the action of gravity, the friction of the air which it must expend its energy on overcoming, the turbulence of the air around its surface, and the rate and direction of the ball's spin.
    And yet, someone who might have difficulty consciously trying to work out what 3 x 4 x 5 comes to would have no trouble in doing differential calculus and a whole host of related calculations so astoundingly fast that they can actually catch a flying ball.

Read on ...    People who call this "instinct" are merely giving the phenomenon a name, not explaining anything.
    I think that the closest that human beings come to expressing our understanding of these natural complexities is in music. It is the most abstract of the arts - it has no meaning or purpose other than to be itself.
    Every single aspect of a piece of music can be represented by numbers. From the organisation of movements in a whole symphony, down through the patterns of pitch and rhythm that make up the melodies and harmonies, the dynamics that shape the performance, all the way down to the timbres of the notes themselves, their harmonics, the way they change over time, in short, all the elements of a noise that distinguish between the sound of one person piping on a piccolo and another one thumping a drum - all of these things can be expressed by patterns and heirarchies of numbers.
    And in my experience the more internal relationships there are between the patterns of numbers at different levels of the heirarchy, however complex and subtle those relationships may be, the more satisfying and, well, whole, the music will seem to be.
    In fact the more subtle and complex those relationships, and the further they are beyond the grasp of the conscious mind, the more the instinctive part of your mind - by which I mean the part of your mind that can do differential calculus so astoundingly fast that it will put your hand in the right place to catch a flying ball - the more that part of your brain revels in it.
    Music of any complexity (and even "Three Blind Mice" is complex in its way by the time someone has actually performed it on an instrument with its own individual timbre and articulation) passes beyond your conscious mind into the arms of your own private mathematical genius who dwells in your unconscious responding to all the inner complexities and relationships and proportions that we think we know nothing about.
    Some people object to such a view of music, saying that if you reduce music to mathematics, where does the emotion come into it? I would say that it's never been out of it.
    The things by which our emotions can be moved - the shape of a flower or a Grecian urn, the way a baby grows, the way the wind brushes across your face, the way clouds move, their shapes, the way light dances on the water, or daffodils flutter in the breeze, the way in which the person you love moves their head, the way their hair follows that movement, the curve described by the dying fall of the last chord of a piece of music - all these things can be described by the complex flow of numbers.
    That's not a reduction of it, that's the beauty of it.
    Ask Newton.
    Ask Einstein.
    Ask the poet (Keats) who said that what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.
    He might also have said that what the hand seizes as a ball must be truth, but he didn't, because he was a poet and preferred loafing about under trees with a bottle of laudanum and a notebook to playing cricket, but it would have been equally true.
    Because that is at the heart of the relationship between on the one hand our "instinctive" understanding of shape, form, movement, light and on the other hand our emotional responses to them.

go placidly

This is the second of a series of tracks that started with trees and stars. This one is more laid back, as the title suggests:

go placidly

Things I learnt while making this:
- Having monitor speakers does really help
- You can always shave 20 seconds off if you think about it

favorite free music

There are many many people now making music and giving it away for free on the internet. Which is also what this site is about, if you havent already noticed. Anyway, here are a couple of my favorite free 'netlabel' releases, both from inhabitants of the watmm-ekt forums. Or, in other words, here are a couple of people who are much better at doing what I am trying to do:

Maus - Recogniser

Great melodic electronica with crunchy beats. The netlabel (Drift records) doesn't seem to be around anymore, but it can be downloaded from its Internet Archive page.

Wisp - About Things That Never Were

About Things That Never Were and a lot of other brilliant Wisp stuff can be downloaded from The Wisp Archive. As of 2008, Wisp is signed to Rephlex and has an album coming out very soon.

beardstep

Electronic music genres are clearly a bit of a mess. Over the years, the names keep changing and the genres seem to multiply and get more narrowly defined. When the definitions are so specific that changing the timing of your snare catapults your song into a different genre, things have gone a bit wrong. Its great that styles of music evolve and change, but the compulsion to give every style it's own name seems a bit pointless.

I can see the point of genres to distinguish between very different types of music. For example, if someone bought a CD thinking it was Classical, and when they played it at home it turned out to be Rock, they would be justifiably disappointed. But if someone buys a CD thinking it is Dubstep, and then is disappointed when they get home and find out it is 2-Step, then they are probably being a bit too specific in their tastes. Infact, even being able to tell the difference between those two genres is probably a bad sign (or am I just getting old?).

The imaginary genre Beardstep has apparently arisen as a reaction to this. Well, to be honest, unraveling the exact etymology of the word is beyond me - it seems to have been in use for some years, but to me, its emergence seems like a despairing reaction to genre nonsense. But the name does have a nice ring to it, so over at the watmm-ekt forums, the same discussions that spawned the 'Deep Sea Creatures' compilation (see previous post) also spawned a 'This Is Beardstep' compilation.

The idea was to submit tracks that to define the Beardstep sound. What was the sound? No-one could say. But I sat down and thought about beards and then tried to make a 'warm' and 'fuzzy' track. Here is the result:

hirsute harmony by koanotic - 3:53 (7.1 Mb)

(I was also going to try and make it sound 'scratchy', but that bit didn't work out)

Other people also submitted their idea of what Beardstep should be, and the complete compilation is now available as a free Net Release from Analogue Wings Records:

This Is Beardstep by Various Artists

01. Zephyr Nova - F**k tha Razor (Stroke tha Beard)
02. Adjective - Fulvous Wren
03. Johnny Moss - Beard Dub
04. Mike - Dark Locust
05. Lights Set North - Channel
06. Koanotic - Hirsute Harmony
07. Nizu - Demoxinil Shaves the Day
08. Johnny Moss - I'm Never Gonna Get Caught Shaving Whilst You're In my Life, Girl
09. Braintree - Beardstep
10. Mike - Juliet Must Die
11. Beneboi - Smooth
12. Thisket - Odyssey
13. Chris Moss Acid - Beard On

Download ZIP of all tracks (78 Meg)

Considering none of us knew what Beardstep was supposed to sound like, the resulting compilation is surprisingly cohesive, with lots of warm analogue sounds. The tracks by Zephyr Nova and Braintree stand out to me, with Lights Set North's and Beneboi's contributions also getting a lot of praise over on the forums.

I'm hoping we can do volume 2 compilation at some point, perhaps called 'Now Thats What I Call Beardstep', but don't hold your breath.

asio for laptop soundcards

I recently hit a problem with the sound output on my laptop, and a utility called Asio4all came to my rescue.

Read on ...My laptop has a built in soundcard (Yamaha AC-XG) but as far as my music software is concerned, it only has a crappy MME driver and a slightly less crappy DX driver. So when I first got the laptop I also got an M-Audio Audiophile USB. This gave me a nice low-latency ASIO driver.

This was OK while I was on Windows XP SP1, but in the autumn I finally had to upgrade to SP2. The Audiophile USB seemed to work OK at first, but then I found that it was randomly cutting out (sound would just completely stop) after about an hour of use (weirdly, the cut outs often seemed to coincide with the laptop's cooling fan stopping). I tried various versions of the Audiophile drivers, old and new, but it didn't help. Other people seem to have had similar problems. I always knew XP SP2 would get me somehow.

I considered buying another USB sound device, and searching around I found someone recommending Asio4all.

Asio4all is a generic freeware ASIO driver for WDM audio devices. Which means, most built-in laptop soundcards. It works via some clever software-based voodoo (WDM Kernel-Streaming or something) and although it doesn't work with all setups, its developer says is works for 5 out of 6 laptop/soundcard/software combinations.

I installed it, and tweaked the settings a bit, and I'm now getting 11ms latency from my laptop soundcard, instead of the 185ms latency I got with the MME one (the DX driver never seemed to work at all). And I don't have some honking great external USB audio interface with separate power supply sitting on my desk. So if you make music on a laptop, I'd recommend trying it.