MASTER of your UNIVERSE
Apr 1, 2005 12:00 PM, BY JESSE TERRY
For musicians looking to sync a computer's tempo to live musicians, Circular Logic has the solution with its innovative InTime software. InTime listens to MIDI notes and generates a tempo clock for your sequencer. This means that you can have your computer follow along to tempo variations coming from your keyboard, guitar, drums or any other instrument capable of delivering a MIDI signal. As you speed up or slow down, your sequencer's tempo follows you. You don't have to play straight 16th notes, either; you can play fills, solos or whatever you want — InTime starts like a metronome and then adjusts to your playing regardless if you are speeding up or slowing down. Although InTime is a program you have adjust your playing to, it is a great way to have loops and MIDI tracks in programs such as Ableton Live or Propellerhead Reason stay in rhythm with you.
But all of this is dependent on you having the proper equipment to communicate with your computer. I used InTime with an 800MHz Apple Mac G4 PowerBook and a PreSonus Firepod to bring in MIDI (and audio) signals. For MIDI, I used a Yamaha G50 MIDI guitar converter and a Roland TD-7 drum-triggering setup. For sequencing, I used Ableton Live 4 with Reason 2.5 ReWired to Live.
GETTING STARTED
Once you have the program up and running, your next step is to set up your MIDI devices so that InTime knows what to listen for. For Windows, you need to use a utility like MIDI Yoke (a freeware app that you can download from www.midiox.com) to create a virtual MIDI bus. For pre — Mac OS 9.x systems, you need the OMS IAB device; for Mac OS 10.3 and later, you can simply create a virtual IAC bus (Inter-Application Virtual MIDI Device) inside the Audio MIDI Setup (Applications > Utilities > Audio MIDI Setup).
LISTEN TO YOUR DRUMMER
InTime can sync to a live drum performance in two ways: The best method — with the lowest latency — is to use MIDI triggers (or a completely electronic drum set). Alternatively, you can use an audio-to-MIDI converter plug-in. For Mac users, your options are limited in Live: The free plug-in Smart Electronix KTDrumTrigga (www.smartelectronix.com/~koen) will analyze different drum frequencies and output corresponding MIDI signals to other sequencers such as Steinberg Cubase. Another cool plug-in to check out is Tallstick Software TS-AudioToMIDI 3.20 (http://audioto.com), but it's only available for Windows. I opted for the electronic drums, as it was simpler for me and more accurate than the audio-conversion triggering.
You will have to filter your drum triggering unit to make sure InTime is only hearing the notes you mean to play and eliminating sounds from elements such as extraneous snare rattle. The manual for your MIDI drum unit should have instructions on how to do this. I hooked up the Roland TD-7 to my Firepod and took my drummer out of his cave to give InTime a go. With this setup, it was fairly easy to get going, speeding up and slowing down once we adjusted a few features in the Advanced Tracking window (more on that later). But we did find one limitation: You can't abruptly change tempos, or you might fool InTime. Circular Logic solved this problem with a tap tempo button that you can use at any time. My drummer had to really listen (with headphones) to the loops and MIDI tracks we had going along with us, adjusting his tempo to Live's output.
GUITAR SETUP
To test out InTime with my guitar synth, I jammed along to a jazz CD with variable tempos, trying to control the tempos of various audio loops and a MIDI track with my playing. There is a push-and-pull factor to playing with InTime. I found that the tempo of Live would start to go faster or slower than I wanted it to at times, and I had to reel it back in by adjusting my guitar playing. I'm no virtuoso, but this is definitely not a tool for novice musicians. You have to be conscious of what you are doing, and play with InTime rather than at it. Like playing with other musicians, listening and responding are key. There are adjustable features in InTime that make synching more precise and easier to deal with.
After a little practice, it becomes easier to find the settings that best match your playing, enabling you to push or pull InTime slower or faster by adjusting your playing. This is not always easy to do when you also have to focus on notes, tone, chords and rhythm. Trying to push the tempo in one direction or the other seems to be more noticeable on guitar. With drums, the drummer generally controls the tempo in normal circumstances, unless, as the legend goes, you're talking about early Guns N' Roses, whose drummer Steven Adler used to watch Slash's foot to get the tempo. I digress.
SECONDARY FEATURES
InTime has other uses, as well. For transcribers, you can play the piece you are transcribing into InTime and record the timing. When you upload the MIDI recording into the notation score of your sequencer, minor variations in your playing tempo don't throw the whole transcription off — for example, a rubato is a rubato, not a whole note tied to a quintuplet.
The Groove Tracking control in the Advanced Tracking window is good for synching prerecorded MIDI tracks to a new recording. In Groove Tracking, the tempo stays at the same rate while InTime records nuances of a performer's groove and rhythmic subtleties. You will then import both the notes and the rhythmic feel into your sequencer, where you can apply it to the prerecorded MIDI parts. For example, imagine having a funky keyboard player (say, Herbie Hancock) record a part for you and applying that player's feel to your boring, four-to-the-floor drums.
InTime is also useful for recording MIDI tracks alongside a prerecorded live performance. For instance, you could record a jazz drummer on a MIDI set — minor variances in tempo included — and import that MIDI tempo track into your sequencer. You could then record all of your other MIDI parts in time with a variable-tempo drum track without fear of automatic quantization throwing the rhythm off and enabling clean looping over said drum performance. This is a cool feature for people interested in dubbing electronics over a Bitches Brew-style jam performance. It's also a great way to track drums without having to use a click track or hard-edit the performance to a grid.
A FEW SUGGESTIONS
InTime is a brilliant piece of software for live musicians, though it's still in its infancy. I found the interface a little clunky and would like to see a way to connect the separate windows into one (possibly tabbed) interface. That said, there are times when you only need the metronome up front so that you can keep track of timing. It would be nice to see less reliance on third-party plug-ins for both the MIDI setup and the audio-to-MIDI conversion. With a good audio-to-MIDI input, InTime would rule the market for drummers and even DJs looking to sync their laptops to their turntables. Although it is always important for musicians to listen to each other, it would also be nice if you didn't have to worry as much about InTime going off tempo. No one wants to listen to a metronome or wear headphones; ideally, you are trying to make the computer listen to you.
An unexpected use of InTime was its facility as a tool for rhythm training — it was interesting to see how variable my tempo really was, even when I thought I was playing perfectly in rhythm. It takes awhile to get used to playing with InTime, but it is very exciting to think about the new possibilities of seamlessly using loops and MIDI tracks alongside a live band. For more information, check out www.circular-logic.com.
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