Why aren't rock beats consistent?

[fwrunner2018]

Hi;
In playing with commercial rock tracks in Reaper, I have found that no track will align perfectly to the ruler, no matter how hard I try to get the BPM perfect. I can look at a section of the track and watch the ruler change as I change the BPM, and the beats will align in a particular area I am looking at, but when I scroll to a different section of the track, the beats are no longer lined up.

My assumption is that the slight variations in tempo throughout a rock track are required for whatever reason, and may even sound better than if the whole track were performed using a metronome. Might it sound too 'wooden'?

My purpose for wanting to align the beats perfectly is that I am trying to mix two tracks which are the same song but rendered by different artists. I know it sounds crazy, but doing this is giving me a lot of good experience with Reaper, using stretch markers, and other editing techniques.
Sometimes the mix sounds pretty good, even though there are variations in the artist's performance that cannot be perfectly matched.

All of this is of course solely for my own enjoyment.

Your thoughts?

FW

[domzy]

if they are played by real people then they are never going to be totally in time. humans aren't perfect.
Other possible reasons could be slight deviations in the recording path - the tape speeding up slightly etc. I've even noticed compressing audio to a lossy format like mp3 can affect tempo

[karbomusic]

Your thoughts?

OT but important to understand: It's called feel and that same music would sound terrible if it fit a grid. I was just watching a documentary the other night (I forget which one) where the engineer mentioned that transition from non-grid to grid starting somewhere in the 80s where today, many hyper focus on it and lose the original human aspect and don't even realize it. That doesn't mean there isn't great music to be made (based on genre) using a grid but rather stating that *all* great music does *not* belong on one.

[serr]

Originally Posted by fwrunner2018

Hi;
In playing with commercial rock tracks in Reaper, I have found that no track will align perfectly to the ruler, no matter how hard I try to get the BPM perfect. I can look at a section of the track and watch the ruler change as I change the BPM, and the beats will align in a particular area I am looking at, but when I scroll to a different section of the track, the beats are no longer lined up.

My assumption is that the slight variations in tempo throughout a rock track are required for whatever reason, and may even sound better than if the whole track were performed using a metronome. Might it sound too 'wooden'?

My purpose for wanting to align the beats perfectly is that I am trying to mix two tracks which are the same song but rendered by different artists. I know it sounds crazy, but doing this is giving me a lot of good experience with Reaper, using stretch markers, and other editing techniques.
Sometimes the mix sounds pretty good, even though there are variations in the artist's performance that cannot be perfectly matched.

All of this is of course solely for my own enjoyment.

Your thoughts?

FW

You are discovering that real music played by real musicians doesn't line up to a metronome like the Casio keyboard demo sounding stuff!

Some of this IS in fact nuance. (You will even find musical notation for such things. Ritards, grace notes, ... just to scratch the surface.) And of course some of it is just human imperfection that either doesn't cross the line or in fact comes across as a bit of nuance or character.

Anyway, nothing syncs together by itself. Sometimes not even machines connected by word clock! You can't even truly take something recorded to a metronome (click track) on one machine and enter that same metronome value on a second - they'll drift. You need to snap the grid to the music and then proceed from there.

This will be that times 100. Two mixes that were never intended to run together in the first place. You're just going to have to roll up your sleeves and edit the tempo and there will be spots where you're editing down to couple second chunks. The Elastique Pro pitch/time compression is really good. Lossless in verispeed mode which wouldn't work here but VERY good in unlinked mode. You want to alter the tempo while preserving the pitch (unlinked pitch/time compression).

You may get some mileage out of some transient detection features. Reaper probably has something like Beat Doctor that can auto place markers on transients. Sorry - haven't had the need to play with this. I'd just roll up my sleeves, start laying down markers, and stretch/alter the target audio to the reference.

You may decide as you go that you need to sometimes alter one or the other instead of using one as reference and only altering the second.

You're into sound creation and experimentation here. There's no autopilot. You'll find the auto beat matching quantize-like functions just mutilate things and your back to sounding like that Casio demo button again.

[lunker]

Originally Posted by serr

(You will even find musical notation for such things. Retards, grace notes, ... just to scratch the surface.)

Minor gripe: It's "ritard(ando)", not "retard".

EDIT: Insert your own joke here -- I started to, but then thought better of it.

[serr]

Originally Posted by lunker

Minor gripe: It's "ritard(ando)", not "retard".

EDIT: Insert your own joke here -- I started to, but then thought better of it.

Sorry, caught me before my typo edits! Shitty one too!

[karbomusic]

I always have to dig for this link but it should be required reading...

https://mjbphd.wordpress.com/2011/08...rimer-on-feel/

Every form of modern popular music carries in its DNA, a derivation of African music.

One of the most interesting things about African music (and many other forms of ethnic and folk music) is its general (almost nonliteral, nonlinear) adherence to timing. Perhaps because most ethnic music is not based around a system of notation (and is instead, passed from teacher to disciple in an oral tradition), the concept of timing appears more subjective to the individual musicians than in a piece of classical music (where strict attention is literally paid to timing, and uniformity of performance).

This somewhat general and perhaps subjective adherence to timing (or ‘looseness’) in various ethnic music forms has a curious effect on the performance of a given piece of music. Instead of there being a specific down beat where everyone lands simultaneously, there is a loose (yet general) idea of where down beats are relative to each player (and to each instrument sound).

...

When instruments are played together in this way, a remarkable and unique sensation of movement which is generated. All the instruments are perceived as working together, but they are neither dependent upon one another, nor are they particularly independent. They can be said to be performing together interdependently.

[deeb]

i might understand that feel might be no very grid friendly and Human is not perfect but we can always get better, so you might consider improving your timing : )

[fwrunner2018]

This is very interesting. I'm going to play around with this concept. Aligning beats to the grid vs not.

You may get some mileage out of some transient detection features. Reaper probably has something like Beat Doctor that can auto place markers on transients. Sorry - haven't had the need to play with this. I'd just roll up my sleeves, start laying down markers, and stretch/alter the target audio to the reference.

You may decide as you go that you need to sometimes alter one or the other instead of using one as reference and only altering the second.

I have found Reaper's Transient Guides very useful, but when they are generated automatically, even when I adjust the threshold and sensitivity carefully, it doesn't pick up every down-beat. But after all, they're guides, not rules.

I have found that, even after I had aligned one track to the grid, trying to bring the second track's beats exactly in-line with the grid as well produced unsatisfactory results. Moving each track this way or that worked a lot better.

[karbomusic]

Originally Posted by deeb

i might understand that feel might be no very grid friendly and Human is not perfect but we can always get better, so you might consider improving your timing : )

If a person doesn't think it 'feels' good then there is likely room for improvement but I can tell you from direct experience that better in the feel department may or may definitely not mean "more on the grid" - it can be very elusive. Conversely, there are plenty of us out there with not so great "timing" in general so that is always something to improve upon because you can't create great feel (grid or not) without a good sense of timing.

[lunker]

Originally Posted by karbomusic

I can tell you from direct experience that better in the feel department may or may definitely not mean "more on the grid" - it can be very elusive.

Well said. Some of the Beach Boys songs have parts where one of the singers would enter a tad early or late. When I listen to it with my critical engineer ears, I think "Why didn't they notice that, and fix it?" When I listen to it with my music-lover ears, I think "Thank goodness they didn't try to fix that -- it makes the song sound real!" I sometimes wonder it it was even intentional ...

[DVDdoug]

Most bands don't perform (live) to a click track. The tempo is set & maintained by the leader or drummer. With a classical orchestra (or opera or musical theater) the tempo is maintained by the conductor. Of course some modern pop acts do use MIDI & pre recorded/programmed backing tracks.

IMO - Most timing variation/drift is not intentional and doesn't add to the musical performance, especially if it's not noticeable. Swing & groove are not the same as timing drift... Some songs do have intentional tempo changes and of course you can program a click track with changes if that's what you want.

But, for hundreds of years music was performed without a metronome. If you look at old sheet music you don't see 'BPM', you see Italian words that mean 'Fast' or 'Slow, or 'Speed-up", etc.

A lot of drummers don't like playing to a click, although sometimes the drummer doesn't get any say in the matter.

Sometimes the (human) drum track is used as the click-track. That way all of your takes are time-aligned even though there is some time imperfection & drift.

I think the original mechanical metronomes were used to teach timing to music students. I've never seen one used during a performance.

Before computers perfect timing wasn't important, but now it makes everything easier for the engineer & producer.

[karbomusic]

Originally Posted by lunker

Well said. Some of the Beach Boys songs have parts where one of the singers would enter a tad early or late. When I listen to it with my critical engineer ears, I think "Why didn't they notice that, and fix it?" When I listen to it with my music-lover ears, I think "Thank goodness they didn't try to fix that -- it makes the song sound real!" I sometimes wonder it it was even intentional ...

That's a great point. I just recorded and produced my band's latest record. The biggest thing I had to be careful with was fixing stuff where when listening as a lab coat engineer I'd want to move it but when listening as a music lover it did not need moving. Additionally, the moment I move a note that isn't clearly a mistake, I become sort of the one who played that note and that dilutes the entire reason for having band members to begin with which is combined human elements.

[karbomusic]

We don't want to conflate playing to a click with grid/quantize alignment...

Playing to a click is not necessarily = to losing feel. I can play to a click and move all around it. IOW, a click is more for retaining overall tempo and/or ease with an edit here and there but that's about it. The exception is things like a ritard that is long enough that the following click should be moved over a tad but in those cases, I do just that.

I should iterate, I have no problem with any method, grid, quantize, feel or free time - just noting that there are differences between all of them and all of them have value.

[tls11823]

It's not unusual for a drummer to intentionally nudge the tempo a bit faster in the chorus and pull it back in the verse. I'm only talking one or two BPM - nothing necessarily perceptible by the listener, but enough to give it a bit of an energetic boost to emphasize the hook of the song.

[Jeffsounds]

A few days ago I watched a video of the Eagles Hell Freezes Over concert that was played on VH1 or MTV or one of them music channels back in about 1995. I was amazed at how much Henley pushes the tempo when he plays drums, especially the up tempo songs. There are songs where he comes out front to sing and someone else plays the drums and those songs sounded great. But Henley pushed the tempo like crazy! You could almost feel the band trying to pull him back a bit. Of course, they're so strict in the studio you don't hear that push on their studio stuff.

[davetbass]

Originally Posted by karbomusic

We don't want to conflate playing to a click with grid/quantize alignment...

Playing to a click is not necessarily = to losing feel. I can play to a click and move all around it. IOW, a click is more for retaining overall tempo and/or ease with an edit here and there but that's about it. The exception is things like a ritard that is long enough that the following click should be moved over a tad but in those cases, I do just that.

I should iterate, I have no problem with any method, grid, quantize, feel or free time - just noting that there are differences between all of them and all of them have value.

I was going to say something smart about rock drummers not being able to concentrate for more than 5 seconds on anything other than food, beer or girls, but what this guy said is genuinely smart and I agree 100%

[richie43]

Originally Posted by karbomusic

I always have to dig for this link but it should be required reading...

https://mjbphd.wordpress.com/2011/08...rimer-on-feel/

I'm not sure where I've seen that in the past (perhaps you posted a link before), but that's an awesome article.

[karbomusic]

Originally Posted by richie43

I'm not usre where I've seen that in the past (perhaps you posted a link before), but that's an awesome article.

Judders turned me on to it, then I posted it a time or two but I keep losing it lol, I should put in my sig so I don't lose it yet again.

[richie43]

Originally Posted by karbomusic

Judders turned me on to it, then I posted it a time or two but I keep losing it lol, I should put in my sig so I don't lose it yet again.

I even bookmarked it AND sent the url to myself in an email. Maybe I will go old-school and write the url on a piece of paper and post it on my fridge.

[jrk]

Originally Posted by fwrunner2018

Why aren't rock beats consistent?

Because that would be boring. It's about the balance between predictability and surprise. I work with a drummer who wanders a few bpm through the verses, all his fills are 5% faster and choruses could be anything.

I'm looking at a Dick Dale tune (Banzai Washout, as it happens) here - while the tempo changes quite a lot - approx 175bpm to 185 repeatedly with some bits at 190+, there's a very clear overall pattern following the structure.

A lot of stuff (esp nowadays) is much more consistent. And can be boring. Of course, it works in some genres.

[emarsk]

Originally Posted by tls11823

It's not unusual for a drummer to intentionally nudge the tempo a bit faster in the chorus and pull it back in the verse.

With my former band we used to do exactly the opposite

When we recorded the album, we decided to record with a click track for practical reasons, but we put a bit of extra effort and we built the click tracks with every tempo change we deemed necessary.
We discovered that most of our songs needed to have the chorus just ab bit slower than the verse: it felt more powerful and with a bit more space to breathe; otherwise either the chorus felt rushed or the verse felt like a drag.
I'm talking about a small difference - usually just a couple of bpm, not enough to consciously recognise it - but definitely enough to feel it.

On a smaller scale, but same principle: some riffs sound just a bit "wrong" if I try to quantise them to the grid.

[emarsk]

Oh, and while we're at it, listen to Living Colour's "Mind You Own Business"

[mccrabney]

Originally Posted by tls11823

It's not unusual for a drummer to intentionally nudge the tempo a bit faster in the chorus and pull it back in the verse. I'm only talking one or two BPM - nothing necessarily perceptible by the listener, but enough to give it a bit of an energetic boost to emphasize the hook of the song.

this is why people hate remixing my songs - my tempo is always changing

[LugNut]

Hi,
Look for an article from em or sound on sound called the feel factor. Nuff said:-)

Oh,,been playing drums professionally for 40 yrs. Recording for 30. Above article is the best dam explanation of "feel" ever.

Some tempo drift is intentional...some not. Depends on who your working with and emotional context.
And beer.

[vdubreeze]

Frankly, I'm surprised the two didn't line up, since so much commercial music, and literally far more than not that are on the charts, are recorded to a grid. For some people (like me) it's one of the reasons when I'm listening in the car I spend more time scanning than listening, usually until I find a station playing pre 1995 music, and it's not because I'm nostalgic or too grumpy to listen to new music. It's numbing. There can be a 140 BPM manic crazy beat and the effect is I'm sedated. and I don't mean as in The Ramones.

If you're talking about rock recordings from any commercial band that plays arenas or stadiums and hasn't been touring off of material released 20 years ago, it's pretty much all click all the time, and most of the time no one is tempo mapping song sections. Nearly all commercially charting modern country music that has a full band, especially with a rollicking beat, is played to a grid. It's like soda. Why are we forced to look at stacks and stacks of horrible, toxic high fructose headlight cleaners when we just want a good soda, with fizz and sugar? Because once a formula is a success they flood you with it, regardless of whether you want it.


fwrunner2018, can you post little snippets of the two?

[toddhisattva]

Originally Posted by fwrunner2018

Hi;
In playing with commercial rock tracks in Reaper, I have found that no track will align perfectly to the ruler, no matter how hard I try to get the BPM perfect.

Tempo variations are sometimes an artistic choice, sometimes they aren't. Sometimes a steady tempo is good, sometimes it isn't.

It's like a D&D alignment chart ;-) with the two axes being "Good/Bad" and "Intentional/Unintentional" like Good/Evil and Lawful/Chaotic.

This article about a Click Track Detector has interesting data about tempo variations and click tracks:

https://musicmachinery.com/2009/03/0...e-click-track/

Because it's not just a click track detector, it's a tempo variation detector too ;-)

[karbomusic]

Originally Posted by LugNut

Hi,
Look for an article from em or sound on sound called the feel factor. Nuff said:-)

It's a great article and along the same lines as the one I posted. What is almost depressing is you had to post an article from 1987 and I had to find the only other one I could find, due to rarity when that information is one of the most important and critical phenomena in music making... period - yet there is so little real information out there comparatively.

[LugNut]

Originally Posted by karbomusic

It's a great article and along the same lines as the one I posted. What is almost depressing is you had to post an article from 1987 and I had to find the only other one I could find, due to rarity when that information is one of the most important and critical phenomena in music making... period - yet there is so little real information out there comparatively.

Hi,
Yep.
As a side note the author of the feel factor along with aphex corp made a tempo tracker in the 90s called "studio clock". I used it live to drive an mpc 60 from my kick and snare. It used some kind of revolving window type code where I could play almost anything and I could push/pull the tempo around gently. Like real world. It has various algorythms where it will track a click that has severely different tempo..ritards etc....and the click can change from 1/4 to 1/8 and no problem.
I even have the live software chip.
Unfortunately reaper doesn't like being a midi clock slave. But it still works and is on saying HELLO as I write this:-)

Sorry for the ot.

Edit..thx karbo...haven't reread that article in decades:-) forgot there was a predecessor to the studio clock. He made it after the article was published.

[orbiterred]

wow! those two articles are great! definitely must read stuff for any music maker and really helped shine a light on a few things I've been struggling with lately.

[Jeffsounds]

One of the greatest drummers in the history of music, Mike Portnoy uses a click track when he records. Of course, he doesn't play the same beat or tempo for more than a bar or two...

[ivansc]

A certain globally-known keyboard player had a habit of playing faster as he played louder. I was involved with a company that had already done some work for him on other electronics and "we" sorted out a foot pedal that was connected to his foot volume pedal, the resultant signal governing the speed at which the Sequenced stuff played back "live". Cute idea but I honestly dont remember how well it worked out in practiCe. Easy Peasy these days though.

[RDBOIS]

Above is the deviation and the tempo map for Stairway to Heaven. Notice how it goes from approx 75 bpm to approx 105 bpm - with loads of deviation the entire song.

IMO - the ultimate rock -feeling- song of all times : an emotional smörgåsbord !

[fwrunner2018]

On kind of a side-note;
I am trying to determine BPM for my entire .flac music library, and using two sources for the data:
This site: https://www.all8.com/tools/bpm.htm, where I tap in the beats myself.
And this one: https://songbpm.com, where you just enter the song (+artist) and it displays the BPM for the song (from Spotify). I have found that for some songs, the listed BPM is 2x what I tap in. It appears that what they are counting is drum + symbol hits. I was under the impression that BPM is normally determined by counting only drum hits - and sometimes only bass drum hits.

For my purposes I use only the drum hits, unless there aren't any; then I use symbol or whatever is making any sort of beat.

[vdubreeze]

Originally Posted by fwrunner2018

On kind of a side-note;
I am trying to determine BPM for my entire .flac music library, and using two sources for the data:
This site: https://www.all8.com/tools/bpm.htm, where I tap in the beats myself.
And this one: https://songbpm.com, where you just enter the song (+artist) and it displays the BPM for the song (from Spotify). I have found that for some songs, the listed BPM is 2x what I tap in. It appears that what they are counting is drum + symbol hits. I was under the impression that BPM is normally determined by counting only drum hits - and sometimes only bass drum hits.

For my purposes I use only the drum hits, unless there aren't any; then I use symbol or whatever is making any sort of beat.

The reason for the bpm being 2x is simple: it depends how you count it while it's playing.

The difference is between tapping, on a simple kick snare beat, every kick and snare, which would mean you're tapping k, sn, k, sn which would be quarter notes (if that's one bar of 4 beats) and tapping only the kicks, so it's k, k, k, k, which would be half notes, (every other beat), and take twice as long to tap 4 times. So the latter example is actually two bars not one, for each 4 taps. Whereas the former is one bar for 4 taps. Hence the 2x interpretation of the tempo. Confusing if music notation is foreign to someone, I know : ) but...

When a program is telling you the BPM, it's beats per measure, not beats per 2 measures. You want to tap quarter notes so it's 4 beats/taps to a bar. Very generally that will be kick/1, sn/2, k/3, sn/4 (not always but often enough).

A standard 4 on the floor kick patterned dance club beat will be around 120 bpm, it won't be 60 bpm or 240 : ) So if you think of a ballad being between very roughly between 50 and 85, a slightly faster medium rock beat being around 85 to 115 and anything above 140 to be pretty fast, you'll have some general sense of which result is correct and which is half or twice the right bpm #.

[citizenkeith]

Originally Posted by fwrunner2018

Your thoughts?

FW

Well, we didn't have this micro-level control, for the most part, before the 2000s. There are exceptions of course, but I think it's important for anybody working in the "rock genre" to become intimate with music recorded before 1980. And especially music recorded before 1960.... R&B, blues and jazz. Check out Robert Johnson, probably the most influential figure in rock music. His music was recorded in the 1930s, but were reissued on LP in the early 1960s and influenced a generation of rock musicians and we are still feeling the repercussions of that album.

Some of the most vital, powerful music of our the past 70 years doesn't follow a grid, it follows human emotion.

[fwrunner2018]

I think I'm confusing BPM (beats per measure) with bpm (beats per minute).
I am recording bpm at this point.

[gkurtenbach]

Originally Posted by richie43

I'm not sure where I've seen that in the past (perhaps you posted a link before), but that's an awesome article.

First time I'm seeing this article. Yeah, its great and it lines up with my theories about why grid-based music doesn't work in many situations.

DAWs need to evolve to support manipulating the "feel". I'm always trying to simulate "four guys playing live" by myself in my DAW. Getting the feel right is the biggest bottleneck in the process. So many times I have to record all the parts before I really understand if the song is going to have the right feel.

Current DAWs are very unintelligent and don't understand much about the content they are manipulating. Maybe in the future AI will help develop editing tools that are much more "musical" and help us get away from the overly simple model of "grid-based or nothing" paradigm we are stuck in.

[RDBOIS]

Originally Posted by gkurtenbach

Current DAWs are very unintelligent and don't understand much about the content they are manipulating. Maybe in the future AI will help develop editing tools that are much more "musical" and help us get away from the overly simple model of "grid-based or nothing" paradigm we are stuck in.

I think part of the problem is that we ofter use tools to save time - this means compromising. But if we take the time we can deal with every little detail as we please.

I find MIDI VSTi's are also the source of some issues - because they require and obey to a click track. But, if you have time, you can - say for example: play an acoustic guitar without a click track and create a tempo map manually. Then the VSTi's will obey this personalized click track. This takes time - pun intended

[gkurtenbach]

Originally Posted by RDBOIS

But, if you have time, you can - say for example: play an acoustic guitar without a click track and create a tempo map manually.

Totally agree and most often, I do exactly what you say: record performance with acoustic guitar and no click. Sometimes I make tempo map manually but most of time it does guarantee a tight fit or great feel. In this case, the grid, many times, is more of an indicator where approximately the beat is, not "the exact sweet spot for the groove".

Reaper's audio tools like stretch markers are helpful to deal with this type of detail. It would be wonderful to have same functionality for midi, and have midi not be fundamentally measure/beat based. I know you can fool midi items to be independent of measure/beat but it can finicky and tricky to use.

Really, what we need are higher level tools that "listen to audio" and have smarts about what they do. Right now, as you say, we an do that manually but its a lot of work and requires expertise.

Here's an example. Lots of times I get a part in a song where the timing feel isn't "right". Sometimes this happens because the drumming is out, but other times the drumming is fine and another instrument is causing the problem. This can be hard to figure out: soloing each track everything sounds fine. It would be nice to have tools that show how instruments are deviating from one another and, even better, provides a fix, as in "tighten up performance". If I go and quantitize everything to the grid, this generally loses the feel. So we need some tools that have more musical smarts in them.