Recording - June 2014 - 48

B Y M I K E M E T L AY

Every once in a while a program
comes along that totally blindsides you
and leaves you blinking. That's Liquid
Rhythm, the new beat creation software
from WaveDNA. It's utterly unlike any
beat creation software on the market that
I know of, fusing some familiar tools like
drum kit creation/editing and piano-rollstyle beat sequencing with a whole
palette of new and fascinating options.
What is Liquid Rhythm?
Liquid Rhythm ("LR") can operate as a
standalone program for Mac OS X or
Windows, or as a VST, AU, or RTAS plug-in
within a DAW. It's available in two versions:
the full version and the very affordable
Liquid Rhythm Intro, which lacks several of
the most powerful and esoteric features of
the full version but still offers a lot of power.
LR can work in both the MIDI and
audio realms. In MIDI terms, it can create
full arrangements of MIDI drums and
export them to a DAW for playback, or
you can input MIDI files, rearrange and
modify them, and re-export the results to
your DAW. The arrangements can also
be used inside LR to play back its built-in
sounds (or sounds you import-see
below) and create exportable audio files,
either full mixes or individual instrument
tracks. It can accept and remap MIDI controller data for live playing and tweaking,
and its built-in sounds are mapped by
default to the MIDI Notes of the General
MIDI drum map standard.
Okay-so it generates MIDI or audio
rhythm files and gives you the results.
That's easy enough to understand... but
it's how Liquid Rhythm does this that is so
mind-bending.
Starting simple
As you can see from the screenshots, LR
has a neatly paned interface with individual
parts that can be quickly hidden and
recalled as needed. The center of the program is the Arranger, a piano-roll sequencer
that contains the actual note data. Each
instrument in a drum kit has its own
sequencer track, broken up into conventional musical bars (4/4 time only... well, technically 8/8), and a built-in mixer lets you
tweak panning, level, mute/solo/record,
and so on. You can load entire kits, specific
instruments, or loops in various styles, and
swap instruments easily.
48

RECORDING June 2014

WaveDNA Liquid Rhythm
A rhythm creation tool like no other
LR comes with 3 kits plus some extra
sounds when you first download it; you'll
want to immediately go to the Help menu
and download the remaining library content, offering many more samples spread
out over 9 more kits in a variety of genres. A built-in Kit Editor lets you build custom kits from existing sounds, and an
Instrument Editor lets you import your
own WAV or AIFF samples and map them
to MIDI notes for use in a kit. There are no
built-in audio effects; audio generated
this way will be dry until you process it in
your DAW.
Clicking on Loops in the library will
bring up nearly 800 loops, sorted by
genre, which you can audition and drag
into your Arrangement. They load with a
default kit selected, but it's easy enough
to cut and paste the relevant data into
your chosen kit's tracks. Each track is
color-coded and each instrument is tied to
a particular role in a drum kit-kick,
snare, toms, hi-hat, etc.. This is important
because when you start manipulating
your tracks in LR, it will attempt to narrow
down the many choices available to you
by suggesting tweaks that are relevant to
the instrument at hand, as I'll explain
below.
There are the usual transport controls;
you can start, stop, rewind, and loop
your arrangement easily enough, and
there are various levels of zoom available
to help you see what you're doing, many
assisted by keyboard shortcuts.

Messing with Molecules
Now it's time to dive down the rabbit
hole! The basic chunk of data in LR is the
BeatForm-all the notes that can appear in
one beat of the arrangement for one instrument. This can be as simple as a single
eighth-note hit, or two 16th-notes, or the
second of two 16ths but not the first... all
the way down to combinations like "the
first half of the beat is a set of two 32ndnotes with a hit on the first but not on the
second, and the second half of the beat is
a triplet with the second hit missing". There
are 99 possible combinations of hits just
within a single beat!
A bar of music contains eight BeatForms
in a row, with any of them being a rest
rather than a hit or hits. This is organized
as something called a BarForm: a set of
groupings of beats in a way that makes
rhythmic sense. For example, a bar of kick
drum might encourage you to count,
"ONE two three four FIVE six seven
eight," or a more syncopated rhythm
might be "ONE two three FOUR five six
SEVEN eight." These placements of
accents, grouped into twos and threes,
make up a BarForm, and they're colorcoded-blue for a two-count, red for a
three-count, with an accent followed by
one or two "weaker" beats. (You can see
this grouping of blue chunks of two and
red chunks of three along the bottom of
every bar in the screenshot.) This becomes
important when we get into manipulating
BarForms using LR's built-in tools.

Recording - June 2014

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