When I worked, I was a master of 'constructive procrastination" i.e. “Never do today that which can be put off until tomorrow, as you may not have do do it tomorrow”. This was partially driven by an e-mail inbox full of staff ‘CCs’ which I knew they would resolve themselves by virtue of my inaction.
Sadly, I have carried that over to music in my retirement, and I seem to find ever more ways to stop my tackling the half finished snippets in my Live projects folder To spread my syndrome, I thought I share another side track to wreck the progress of others…
This is Midiexplorer, at ttps://sourceforge.net/projects/midiexplorer/files/latest/download
It’s a bit academic, but I spent a happy hour looking at Scaler songs. The following are from “Brighton Cafe” by one D Carbone.
Here are a few screen shots. {Incidentally, which shows that the ‘rhythm’ analysis shows no variation in the current internal progressions.
So if you want to avoid what task it is that ‘the boss’ is requesting, you can look busy with examining this.
The only thing I got out of that is the little entity peeking out between the Chordgram and the Notegram. Apparently he is as overwhelmed by it all as me.
In all fairness, I did point out that it was a waste of time.
However, there was small motivation for the side track. In working on a ‘trance’ type piece I was trying to get a handle on velocity variation and ‘dragging’ / ‘leading’ as my attempts sound too metronomic, and found this gizmo to look at midi files I had of reference tracks to see what they were doing. Having found something I liked, I could then add it as a groove into Live and map that into my track.
Here’s a couple of analyses of one of the ‘Niko’ piano mids as an indication
Note duration (left hand chords and right hand melody show up)
… and the velocity variation (completely uniform in Scaler, so a groove cold be used there ?)
…and here’s the notes dragging
I’m exploring this to see if I can identify patterns of reference tracks to then use as a groove.
{Remember, I’m a musical ignoramus, so things which come naturally to the pro’s pass me by.]
Nothing is a complete waste of time if you get something out of it. It does remind me of my early days of learning music, I over analyzed everything. I try not to do that anymore and just let it flow but that’s not always so easy. Wish I had something like Scaler when I was learning chords in those days of yore.
Goes to to show despite of all the diligence in the data, my estimates were still way off. I thought that little red “entity” in between the original graphs was a bird. Shocked to find out it was quite the opposite. I still have much to learn in data analytics, apparently
