Plugin: Auto Audio Humanize

I've just finished up another small utility plugin in sonic birth (mac only). It's a device designed to randomly delay or advance audio clips in Live by a small amount, though it should work in other hosts too.

There are only two parameters:

Early/late base: sets a kind of base delay for the audio.

Random delay: represents the amount of random delay that is added to the Early/late base value.

The random delay value is re-generated each time the incoming audio drops to digital silence, so it works well for 'monosyllabic' audio clips separated by empty space (if the device is preceded by a plugin that adds a tail to the sound, such as a reverb, the random delay value might not be recalculated before the following sound begins).

Here's a video to give a quick idea of how it works. Here I've duplicated a track containing a pattern of drum hits and applied the Auto Audio Humanizer to the duplicate track. You can hear a phasing effect when the displacement is very small, and a more distinct repeat when it is large.

If you'd like to use the plugin, do the following:

1. If you don't already have it, install Sonic Birth (provides the framework necessary for the plug to work).
2. Install the Auto Audio Humanize component
3. If you want to tinker with the circuit, download the source file

Faking swing for audio clips in Ableton Live

Ableton live has a swing function, but its effect is limited to midi notes and warped audio clips. A recent post over at Wire to the Ear talks about how to use Live's swing capability. But if you're like me you have lots of separate, unwarped audio clips on your timeline, little 'monosyllabic' sounds. And if you want these to swing, Live won't help you.

If you need a simple swing for your audio clips, here's a quick and rough way to fake it.

Open a new set. Using audio clips, lay out a skeleton drum beat with a hihat line on every 16th. Open the song tempo automation lane on the master channel. Zoom in so that you're seeing a grid line on every 16th division, and use the pencil tool to draw this step on the first two 16th notes.

Select the first two 16ths of the master channel automation lane and duplicate them (apple+D) until the first bar is filled. Play through the pattern and experiment with different timings until you have a feel that your satisfied with. The greater the size between the tempo steps, the more extreme the swing will be. To make sure the automation steps always repeat the same two values, use the duplicate to copy them to the rest of the bar whenever you want to try a new feel.

Once you're happy with the feel, duplicate the automation pattern until it extends further than you expect your track to be long.

As with the groove quantize hack, the same gotchas apply:

1. If you need to change tempo during a track this method isn't suitable.
2. Be careful that you disable warp on single-hit clips that you place on the timeline, unless you want them smeared as the master tempo changes!
3. Currently, Live only 'notices' the song tempo automation at the beginning of each 16th measure, so you may find in order to transfer a groove at an acceptable 'resolution' it may be necessary to double the song tempo before beginning this process.
4. If you're using tempo synchronised effects (eg. a delay), these will behave unpredictably if your master tempo is fluctuating rapidly.
   

Song tempo automation in Ableton Live is not continuous

I just figured something out that would have saved me a lot of trouble if it had been mentioned in the Live manual: Live's song tempo automation is not continuous (in version 7 and below). Although you can draw a ramp in the song tempo automation lane, Live will only sample its value, and adjust the song tempo accordingly, at the beginning of each 16th grid line.

In the following diagram we can see that the tempo automation changes at A and B have no effect on the song tempo (we can tell because the waveform display of the repeating audio clip stays the same). The only tempo change that is picked up is C, because Live is only sampling the automation value at the beginning of every 16th.



This is pretty disappointing, and has consequences for anyone wanting to implement the 'fake groove quantize' approach that I talked about in a previous post.

Ableton Live: How to fake groove quantize

Ableton Live (v7 and lower) is lousy when it comes to working with grooves. But there's a workaround that might be useful until Ableton incorporates real groove quantize support in a future version of Live.

The workaround makes it possible to get midi and audio clips to match the groove of a 'master clip'. To get this working you need to set up warp markers on an audio clip and then specify that the clip's warp grid should modify the master tempo of the set. This creates a master tempo automation pattern. The is automation pattern continually nudges your set's tempo forward and back so that the grid lines in the arrange view correspond to the warp points you set up in the master clip.

If that description was a little hard to follow, watch the video below and it will become clear.

Gotchas:

1. If you need to change tempo during a track this method isn't suitable.
2. Be careful that you disable warp on single-hit clips that you place on the timeline, unless you want them smeared as the master tempo changes!
3. Currently, Live only 'notices' the song tempo automation at the beginning of each 16th measure, so you may find in order to transfer a groove at an acceptable 'resolution' it may be necessary to double the song tempo before beginning this process.
4. If you're using tempo synchronised effects (eg. a delay), these will behave unpredictably if your master tempo is fluctuating rapidly.