Recording - December 2015 - 60
Realtime) over the commandeered audio channel. Expert Sleepers has
recently released a standalone hardware decoder, the USAMO; the
original system was and is for Eurorack modular synthesizers.
an external sync box, MIDI router, or drum machine into
the chain, you're likely adding latencies.
Within Ableton Live, for example, you have the choice
of using the "External Instrument" plug-in on a MIDI track.
Alternately, you can enter negative track delay values on
MIDI tracks for timing compensation, which you may find
more intuitive and flexible.
Are you recording your vintage gear into your DAW or
just having the two play side by side? How you are monitoring your round-trip audio will affect latencies too. For
example, in Ableton Live's terminology, "Recording
Latency Compensation" means round-trip.
Jitter: the devil we don't know... yet
Jitter, being random in nature, is the culprit that your
DAW software can't control or compensate for. The source
of jitter-in particular, MIDI message jitter-is within the
computer's operating system, device drivers, interface
connection (USB) and/or external device firmware.
Anything with a microprocessor that has task scheduling/switching, message buffering, and/or interrupt processing, will contribute to irregular event timing and jitter.
We can't always control jitter, but there are ways to measure it, including the free software mentioned above.
USB = Unusable Sync Behavior!
It may seem counterintuitive, since USB is a high-bandwidth
data connection, but MIDI messages over USB are highly
prone to jitter. Many producers and musicians find these timing irregularities unmusical. The technical reasons for USB's
MIDI timing quirks are far beyond the scope of this article.
Suffice to say that MIDI messages (clock ticks included) get
assigned the lowest priority on the serial bus. Producers seeking perfect timing of external gear will typically avoid USB for
MIDI messages. The important point with USB is that the
audio grid and MIDI grid are not locked together-they are
separated, and will vary from one another... randomly!
Disparity between the audio and MIDI grids can also crop
up with FireWire, not just USB. As Figure 3 shows, each
device in the hardware chain can compound grid disparity.
What to do? While latency can be compensated for in the
DAW, there is no way to compensate for jitter. Yet jitter must
somehow be removed!
Give me a beat! Hold the jitter please!
There are a number of technologies available to producers which provide them sample-precise hardware timing. The common tactic among all of them is to encode
clock and transport signals (or in some cases full MIDI
messages) over audio channels, so that the "clock ticks"
are cohesively tied to the audio grid. It is a low-tech way
of bypassing the DAW's MIDI I/O entirely, by subverting
the audio channels for data transmission and control.
In the cases of SND's ACME-4 and Innerclock Systems'
Sync Gen II Pro (Synq-Lock), the host DAW application sends
clock and transport pulses over auxiliary audio channels.
The special hardware boxes reconstitute the pulses into jitterfree clock (either MIDI or DIN Sync). The ACME-4 is based
around a 4 PPQN (16th note) timebase input; the Sync Gen
Pro's default is 24 PPQN, but can operate at other rates.
The Expert Sleepers system, which combines the Silent
Way plug-in with special hardware modules, offers more
than just jitter-free clocking. It further allows encoding of
any MIDI message (notes, CCs, System Common, SysEx,
Loops or linear?
There are potentially other culprits or "gotchas" when synching external gear to the DAW grid. This depends upon whether we are working
in Pattern (loop-based) mode or Song (linear) mode. Sometimes we may
want to work with both simultaneously, as in Ableton Live.
Many vintage (and even new) hardware instruments have no mechanism for cueing to arbitrary musical measures or beat positions-they cannot respond to MIDI SPP (Song Position Pointer, see below). This is the case
with all DIN Sync devices, but also true of some newer MIDI boxes. For
example, the Korg Volcas and Roland Aira TR-8 are not SPP-compliant.
Ableton Live offers two MIDI clock transmission modes: "Song" (Linear) or
"Pattern" (Loop), the latter avoiding SPP messages. When syncing noncompliant external hardware to the DAW, the Pattern setting may work for
you. This essentially does a "sync-latch" (see below), waiting until the next
measure mark to transmit a MIDI Start message and subsequent Clocks.
Figure 4
To SPP or not SPP, that is the question
During the 1990s, the MIDI Song Position Pointer message was very
well supported among electronic music instruments, sequencers, and
drum machines. Unfortunately, many devices made before or after that
decade have incorrect implementations of SPP, or none at all. Simply
put, if your DAW is sending SPP messages out to your non-compliant
sync box, things will not sync correctly!
These days, new SPP-compliant products are rare. Notable exceptions are the DSI Tempest and the Elektron OctaTrack; both respond
correctly to SPP sync messages. Figure 4 shows how MIDI clock ticks
relate to Song Position Pointer. Notice that SPP values represent the
number of sixteenth notes since the start of a song.
It's worth noting that some older products from the era of tape-based
recording use an audio signal to create sync; this can be recorded on
one track on a tape reel and allow for synchronization and cueing. We
still use SMPTE time code and its MIDI counterpart MTC in our DAWs
Figure 5
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - December 2015
Contents
Recording - December 2015 - Intro
Recording - December 2015 - Cover1
Recording - December 2015 - Cover2
Recording - December 2015 - 1
Recording - December 2015 - 2
Recording - December 2015 - 3
Recording - December 2015 - 4
Recording - December 2015 - 5
Recording - December 2015 - Contents
Recording - December 2015 - 7
Recording - December 2015 - 8
Recording - December 2015 - 9
Recording - December 2015 - 10
Recording - December 2015 - 11
Recording - December 2015 - 12
Recording - December 2015 - 13
Recording - December 2015 - 14
Recording - December 2015 - 15
Recording - December 2015 - 16
Recording - December 2015 - 17
Recording - December 2015 - 18
Recording - December 2015 - 19
Recording - December 2015 - 20
Recording - December 2015 - 21
Recording - December 2015 - 22
Recording - December 2015 - 23
Recording - December 2015 - 24
Recording - December 2015 - 25
Recording - December 2015 - 26
Recording - December 2015 - 27
Recording - December 2015 - 28
Recording - December 2015 - 29
Recording - December 2015 - 30
Recording - December 2015 - 31
Recording - December 2015 - 32
Recording - December 2015 - 33
Recording - December 2015 - 34
Recording - December 2015 - 35
Recording - December 2015 - 36
Recording - December 2015 - 37
Recording - December 2015 - 38
Recording - December 2015 - 39
Recording - December 2015 - 40
Recording - December 2015 - 41
Recording - December 2015 - 42
Recording - December 2015 - 43
Recording - December 2015 - 44
Recording - December 2015 - 45
Recording - December 2015 - 46
Recording - December 2015 - 47
Recording - December 2015 - 48
Recording - December 2015 - 49
Recording - December 2015 - 50
Recording - December 2015 - 51
Recording - December 2015 - 52
Recording - December 2015 - 53
Recording - December 2015 - 54
Recording - December 2015 - 55
Recording - December 2015 - 56
Recording - December 2015 - 57
Recording - December 2015 - 58
Recording - December 2015 - 59
Recording - December 2015 - 60
Recording - December 2015 - 61
Recording - December 2015 - 62
Recording - December 2015 - 63
Recording - December 2015 - 64
Recording - December 2015 - 65
Recording - December 2015 - 66
Recording - December 2015 - 67
Recording - December 2015 - 68
Recording - December 2015 - 69
Recording - December 2015 - 70
Recording - December 2015 - 71
Recording - December 2015 - 72
Recording - December 2015 - Cover3
Recording - December 2015 - Cover4
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