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The Effect that BT uses (pg. 4)
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| peejunk |
Ok, part two of the pissing contest, why not, I've nothing better to do (God forbid I go and make some music when I can flame with other randoms on a buliten board). I probably should apologize for arrogance towards you but it was somewhat caused by your arrogance towards me and others in this discussion (by the attitude and post count, I assume you're among the forum's noblety, right?).
| quote: | Originally posted by DigiNut What the hell... proprietary? Do you even know what that word means? Here you are correcting my terminology and you can't even string together a coherent sentence.
First of all, it doesn't matter whether you call it granular synthesis or granular resynthesis - neither is actually correct, since it's really just an effect. However, it is almost universally known as granular synthesis - go ahead and search on google, you are probably going to find 100 times as many results for the former term. |
Well, I'm not natively english speaking, the term "proprietary" I used as "at one's own will", I cannot always remember the right english term in heat of discussion (and in this case it should have been "any wanted position" or whatever) however semantic difference between synthesis (generation) and resynthesis (re-generaton from an existing source, in this case the original audio) is the same in any european language.
It really doesen't matter which term is more oftenly misused, if one of them is semantically more correct.
| quote: | Originally posted by DigiNut
Granular synthesis is a glorified gate. The only differences are:
1. It uses slices of usually less than 50 ms (which is about the cutoff point where the human ear can hear discrete events);
2. It has a linear and ramped attack and release, unlike a gate which is simply a pulse, and the attack and release are equal; and
3. Some GS plugins allow you to perform additional processing on the individual slices. |
Wrong. If it's "glorified" anything it's a "glorified" digital delay line (it buffers and replays audio), but that's only a tad bit closer than comparing it to a gate.
If it's a sampler doing granular resynthesis, it does what I said, "scans" through the sound and plays small parts of it, not nessesarily in the exact order they're in the original part. Smoothing isn't even required, it's still granular even without smoothing.
If it is an effect, then it needs to buffer audio so it can repeat it, rearrange it etc.
Gates don't buffer. What you refer to above as "gate" is a popular "trance gate effect" more precisely a sidechained gate processor i.e. controlling a gate's amplifier with ANOTHER signal (or controller value) to silence or radically decrease the volume of a sound. The traditional dynamic gate consists of two parts, a level detector and a controlled amplifier. Once the level detector detects input signal's amplitude (or RMS) falling under certain treshold, it then makes the amplifier silence the output. When the input signal returns above treshold it restores the volume. It doesen't buffer.
Or a more graphical example. This is our original sound, each letter representing, say, 25ms of audio and lowercse meaning lower volume:
ABcDEfGHiJKLmNOP
This is what sidechained gate set to cut off every 100ms and hold 50ms would do:
AB..Ef..iJ..mN..
This is what dynamic gate with treshold set to "lowercsse" would do:
AB.DE.GH.JKL.NOP
This is what granular resynthesis set to spread 50ms chunks (sampled at every 25ms) at 75ms intervals would do:
AB.Bc.cD.DE.Ef.fG.GH etc.
With the spread less than chunk size we get overlaps and phase-canceling which results in a flanger-like sound. I've never heard any gate produce that flanger-like effect.
| quote: | Originally posted by DigiNut
Stuttering by definition is repeating the same sound. |
Yes this bit is (the only one that is) totally and indisputably correct, and Fruity Granulizer has a control (hold) that will make it repeat the same audio slice indefinetely (or until the hold control is toggled off). It's a sampler, it doesen't even have to buffer audio (like effect granulizers need to).
Your idea of F. Granulizer is very strange. From your assumption that it's a processing plugin, and not a generating one (it's basically a sampler) I asume you haven't really used it, or haven't really used it more than just a peak at what it does.
Or you're just being headstrong insisting that you were right (which is ok with me, since I can be like that, except now I'm just right ;) )
| quote: | Originally posted by DigiNut
Using MIDI-triggered gates for stuttering is nearly impossible, since MIDI timing is about as accurate as a sundial and nowhere near precise enough to handle the miniscule slices that are usually used in a proper stutter.You need plugins with sample-accurate timing, and you have to tell them exactly when to start buffering and when to start repeating the buffer - which is essentially the exact same thing as doing the edits by hand, except it's LESS flexible, because you're limited to whatever effects the plugin can produce as opposed to your entire array of effect plugins if you did it by hand! |
You really didn't understand what I was saying. I was not talking about gating (what is it with you tranceheads and gating?), I was talking about simply retriggering a sample, where you've previously cut the audio at places where you want stutters, and loading the pieces in a sampler program mapping them to different keys.
I fail to see how on earth could you fet the impression I was talking about gating.
And btw, at the rate of 700+ events per quarter note (ppq or tpq) you can be pretty darn precise. Syncing anything you do in MIDI to some freely streaming audio would be a real bitch, but I wasn't suggesting anything like that here (I was suggesting it above, with dblue Glitch, but I wasn't suggesting being anal retentive).
In real life, no matter what his nano-highness said, you don't really need to be that anal retentive and sample acurate. In real life human hearing doesn't have that temporal precission so missing a plosive would sound different then hitting a plosive, but not at "event" level, but at "timbre" level. We get that good old Stockhausen''s transition between events and timbre.
Even more so, stutters can sound interesting even without being "plosive-aware" as you suggested. Neither BT nor Hybrid invented them, there is no single authority in this world that decides what a "good" stutter is.
I've been doing stutters for a long time (from using 9xx and E9x effects in FT II back in '97 to slicing audio, retriggering and ing about with IDM-ish plugins today), so I think I know pretty much what I'm talking about.
No wonder a lot of trance sounds sameish whit that "only do it the right way" mentality. (It's a joke, a bad one, so keep you knickers on, most dance music sounds sameish, yes, I'm aware, it's the same anti-experimental copycat mentality that's causing it too)
| quote: | Originally posted by DigiNut
FYI, the "low-quality timestretch" on older D'n'B tracks is just linear resampling, unless there's some particular effect you're talking about that I'm not aware of. |
You probably don't know what effect I'm talking about, since no one can mistake that flangy stuttery sound for resampling. It's a timestretching effect on old Akai samplers and low quality stretching algos in software (Cool Edit 96 anyone?) that works on the almost exatcly the same principle as F. Granulizer. It would take the original ABCDEFGH sample and repeat slices in the ABCBCDCDEDEFEFGFGH fashion with some smoothing envelopes in between (or no envelope at all).
This discussion is in desperate need of some audio clips, since now I'm pretty sure a lot of this negativity is caused simply by missunderstanding.
| quote: | Originally posted by DigiNut
And as for the FL native plugins, functionally speaking they are as versatile as many other plugins out there; however, it's the sound quality on them that sucks. If you think it's simply the users that suck, then feel free to put your money where your mouth is and show us what you can do with your precious Fruity Granulizer. |
Sure, that I will most gladly do. However, what will stop you from going all "golden ears", "sensual, full buqet, but not too ripe, a breath of cherry" on me and claim that you hear some "lack of depth and clarity", us mere mortals cannot hear?
Granular resynthes (in the form needed for stuttery effects or better said, artifacts) is not in great need of very smart DSP. It's a pretty simple effect, there are no quality issues that could arise.
But for the sake of the original poster and others interested in the matter, I will provide both zipped FLPs and mp3 samples to illustrate my points. |
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| DigiNut |
Wow, dude... at the risk of sounding like this "noblety" you refer to, I'll cut you some slack because you are new here and try to throw some water on these flames - but you could not be more wrong with how you've tried to peg me or my motivation.
I *very rarely* engage in any pissing contests or flame wars in this forum (in other forums it's another question entirely). The way I see it, this forum is about helping each other, and I'm actually really annoyed by all of the one-upmanship and lack of support that I often see. I'm not a music elitist, I don't even consider myself a great producer, and I certainly don't consider myself better than others because I've been a member longer (although I do have a problem with new people when they stroll in and act like they own the place).
It's just that I'm really really sick of the dumb questions and dumber answers on here. It's fine if people are curious about how a certain sound might be reproduced, but people need to learn that professional productions and the elements therein are not created by using insta-melodies, stock effects, and an expensive studio. They're created with a deep understanding of musical and technical elements (not cookbook style) and a whole lot of hard work.
| quote: | Originally posted by peejunk
however semantic difference between synthesis (generation) and resynthesis (re-generaton from an existing source, in this case the original audio) is the same in any european language.
It really doesen't matter which term is more oftenly misused, if one of them is semantically more correct. |
You ought to tell this to Image-Line then, because they themselves refer to it as granular synthesis:
http://www.flstudio.com/help/html/p...0granulizer.htm
| quote: | If it's a sampler doing granular resynthesis, it does what I said, "scans" through the sound and plays small parts of it, not nessesarily in the exact order they're in the original part. Smoothing isn't even required, it's still granular even without smoothing.
If it is an effect, then it needs to buffer audio so it can repeat it, rearrange it etc. |
Fine, but the FL Granulizer doesn't do any of that. If you're getting into more advanced plugins like crusherX, then sure.
| quote: | | Yes this bit is (the only one that is) totally and indisputably correct, and Fruity Granulizer has a control (hold) that will make it repeat the same audio slice indefinetely (or until the hold control is toggled off). It's a sampler, it doesen't even have to buffer audio (like effect granulizers need to). |
My point was that automating the "hold" to work properly takes twice as much work as just doing the edits by hand, because it doesn't respond instantaneously. If you're just aiming for weird fx, then sure, you can do a lot with it, but to get proper "stutters", that method is extremely unwieldy.
| quote: | | And btw, at the rate of 700+ events per quarter note (ppq or tpq) you can be pretty darn precise. Syncing anything you do in MIDI to some freely streaming audio would be a real bitch, but I wasn't suggesting anything like that here (I was suggesting it above, with dblue Glitch, but I wasn't suggesting being anal retentive). |
OK, but the stutters you hear in tracks from BT *are* "anal retentive". Listen to them - they are far too precise to be controlled by MIDI timing (or at least by the MIDI timing in anything I've used... perhaps there is some hardware that can generate a more accurate clock).
| quote: | | No wonder a lot of trance sounds sameish whit that "only do it the right way" mentality. |
Again with the trance... from where did you get this assumption?
| quote: | | Sure, that I will most gladly do. However, what will stop you from going all "golden ears", "sensual, full buqet, but not too ripe, a breath of cherry" on me and claim that you hear some "lack of depth and clarity", us mere mortals cannot hear? |
Again, what is this assumption based on?
Anyway, it would take all night to respond to everything you just posted, so I'm not going to. A lot of it is correct anyway, so there's no point in arguing. Like you said, this discussion is in desperate need of some audio samples, and in all other respects it's getting longer and going nowhere. So let's hypothetically say that you're right and that all these effects can be done with the Fruity Granulizer - fine, show us. |
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| peejunk |
| quote: | Originally posted by DigiNut
Wow, dude... at the risk of sounding like this "noblety" you refer to, I'll cut you some slack because you are new here and try to throw some water on these flames - but you could not be more wrong with how you've tried to peg me or my motivation.
I *very rarely* engage in any pissing contests or flame wars in this forum (in other forums it's another question entirely). The way I see it, this forum is about helping each other, and I'm actually really annoyed by all of the one-upmanship and lack of support that I often see. I'm not a music elitist, I don't even consider myself a great producer, and I certainly don't consider myself better than others because I've been a member longer (although I do have a problem with new people when they stroll in and act like they own the place). |
I was trying to lighten the discussion with some arguably humorous, but painfully obvious irony. Stop taking it seriously! :)
Yeah, well I already atmitted that I was out of line there and the reaction wasn't really called for, but with your seeming urge to put people in their place I kinda wanted to return the favour. I'm still right tho, and also aware of how much do the IL crew care about what the punters think ;)
| quote: | Originally posted by DigiNut
Fine, but the FL Granulizer doesn't do any of that. If you're getting into more advanced plugins like crusherX, then sure.
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The granulizer does what I said, it's even explained in the manual, the lines to the right of the topmost image on that very link. I doubt that any amount of audio can prove it to you if you've allready heard it do it's thing and still don't see it that way.
| quote: | Originally posted by DigiNut
My point was that automating the "hold" to work properly takes twice as much work as just doing the edits by hand, because it doesn't respond instantaneously. If you're just aiming for weird fx, then sure, you can do a lot with it, but to get proper "stutters", that method is extremely unwieldy.
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True, much more sensible to do what the My Body example does, use start and grain/wave spacing automation with no attack to do stutters.
| quote: | Originally posted by DigiNut
OK, but the stutters you hear in tracks from BT *are* "anal retentive". Listen to them - they are far too precise to be controlled by MIDI timing (or at least by the MIDI timing in anything I've used... perhaps there is some hardware that can generate a more accurate clock).
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Yeah, they're probably audio edits done with pretty high zoom-in, the way he achieves his effects probably are pretty anal, but I still don't bzy the "MIDI isn't precise enough" talk. MIDI timing is way below 50ms treshold (that, as you correctly noticed, marks the 20Hz spot where we misplace events for timbre) so I don't see where's the issue.
| quote: | Originally posted by DigiNut
Again with the trance... from where did you get this assumption?
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Read the small print. 'tis but a joke, if you hang around people that dislike trance you'll hear a lot of that, but unlike me there, they actually mean it seriously. Visit KvR sometimes, and you'll appreciate the irony.
About "do it only the right way" thing -- it's not trance-only thing but lurking around I've seen a lot of it here. On every damn EDM related board, you get those threads repeating indefinetly (as if someone pressed the hold :) ) where people want to know how to use that same abused and overused boring sound, and then they split hairs about it turning it into pc vs. mac or hard vs. soft debates etc.
Here it's the supersaw lead, on DOA it's amen and reese, on techno boards it'll probably be the 303 sound or that ride cymbal hiss they use to uplift the track, hard-whatever lot want those booming kicks and offbeat basses to sound exactly like etc.
Now the samples:
FLP is at http://www.coin-electronic.com/peej...etchstutter.zip
476kB
MP3 is at
http://www.coin-electronic.com/peej...etchstutter.mp3
777kB (maybe it's a sign)
Now for the "fruity challenged":
First two bars are just sliced Amen (Fruity Slicer) with some edits. Next two are amen roughly tuned to play the same pitch and tempo using Granulizer timestretching with transient detection set up and I automated some stutters using hold. Following four bars are akai-style timestretching the amen to play half tempo, the amen stutters even without hold due to transient detection and low attack setting. The following two bars show off some MIDI sequenced stutters using fruity slicer. Then we have two bars of panning, random and modulation effects turned on on the Granulizer, not really nice thing to hear. The Amen section finishes with a Fatboy Slim's Rockafeller Skank style timestretch-to-oblivion by automating wave-spacing and grain-spacing, I slipped in a reverse stretch for fun.
Carefull automation of wave spacing combined with carefull automation of start position can turn Granulizer in a capeable reverse-slice-stutter tool. Fruity Keyboard Controller could be used for easier automation once the sweet spots are found. I was too lazy for that now.
As the Amen section fades out the vocal starts with two bars of playing and stutters with Slicer and MIDI edits, then a bar of some crappy rephrazing unsuccesfully trying to make the darn thing say "Rasta" :). Finally, the vocal section also ends with Akai style timestretch that finishes with Rockafeler Skunk-style zeeong.
I EQd it a bit but it was done with headphones so if it sounds crappy.. well, it.
All in all this was more fun than I expected. |
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| GreenLight |
| Good Lord ... You Type Way Too Much Trying To Explain Yourself ... The Originality Of This Thread Was The Producer BT and How He Is Able To Produce Something We Cannot Even Hope To Explain ... In Short ... No-one Knows ... Because No-one Is BT Here ... I rest My Case ... Please Do Not Overload The Board With The BullFunk ... Peace. |
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| GreenLight |
| Also ... An Article I read interviewing BT, BT Stated he hasn't Used Midi anything In the last 7 Years He's been Producing ... So BT and MIDI Shouldn't even be In the same sentence ... Also He Stated that His Last three albums he sequenced everything By hand and ear, without the use of a "special programmed stutterboxes" ... so BT has more time and moreTalent than we can explain ... |
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| DigiNut |
Those aren't bad, pretty good actually, but the real question is, how easily can you set them to a mix? It's easy to screw around with a sound on its own, but the whole point I've been trying to make is that fitting it to a rhythm is much more difficult when there's no guarantee that the transients will fall on a beat.
And I know you'll think I'm splitting hairs, which is why I'm posting some samples of my own (note that I am not trying to claim that these are amazing quality tracks, they're just here to illustrate my point):
Closer Now 1 (vocal stutters at the beginning and at the end)
Closer Now 2 (drum stutter)
Off the Wreckord 1 (spoken vocal stutter - mix quality isn't as good here, sorry)
BUTRT 1 (glitches in the drums and a stutter on the pad - this is more like what you do with the granulizer)
BUTRT 2 (lots of glitches in the drums)
Chibooti EB 1 (again, stuttered/glitchy drums, this time all using a MIDI triggered sampler - so you see, I am not against this by principle, I *do* use it sometimes)
Again - I am in no way trying to say that these tracks or the stutters/glitches in them are brilliant. But I do think they are way better than the attempts I've heard on the Granulizer. These are edits that I think are fairly decent. They're almost all done by hand (even the MIDI triggered one had a fair bit of pre/postprocessing done).
Finally, there was an entire article written on this technique, and I would suggest that anyone interested check it out:
http://remixmag.com/tech_features/r...tal_tendencies/
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| Reactance |
Hey DigiNut !
Can u explain what is nano correction,BT uses this effect in hes music i think he invented this technique !
Cool |
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| peejunk |
| quote: | Originally posted by GreenLight
Also ... An Article I read interviewing BT, BT Stated he hasn't Used Midi anything In the last 7 Years He's been Producing ... So BT and MIDI Shouldn't even be In the same sentence ... Also He Stated that His Last three albums he sequenced everything By hand and ear, without the use of a "special programmed stutterboxes" ... so BT has more time and moreTalent than we can explain ... |
Oh, sorry, I was under the impression we were on about how to achieve the sonic effect, and not about recreating his painfully time-consuming methods.
| quote: | Originally posted by DigiNut
Those aren't bad, pretty good actually, but the real question is, how easily can you set them to a mix? It's easy to screw around with a sound on its own, but the whole point I've been trying to make is that fitting it to a rhythm is much more difficult when there's no guarantee that the transients will fall on a beat. |
Not that hard, that was a 15 minute hack, and about five minutes were wasted on trying to make the vocal say "Rasta" :).
Here is another example, from a track, stab stutters are MIDI, pad and guitar are Granulizer with some random and pan on, drum stutters are more like 32nd rolls, and off course, they're MIDI. The mixdown is everything but decent (work in progress). The stutters aren't obvious, they're a bit set "back" in the mix since I didn't want them tho be anything but slight distractions from the flow.
http://www.coin-electronic.com/peej...ks_ver_part.mp3
If I'd want to do glitchy/dnb drum stutters I'd export 2 bars of a my beat loop layed out so that I can extract all needed hits, and then just load it in Slicer and whack away.
Closer Now 1 (vocal stutters at the beginning and at the end)
Cool one at the beginning. Anyway, these are doable using both of my methods. With granlizer you'd need to find the start position of both places you'd want to stutter and paste them in event editor (or keyboard ctrl) and then setup wave and grain settings for that area. ty and inprecise but doable and it would sound less controlled and more timestretch-stuttery.
For the exact same controlled effect, I'd personally do it with slicer, I'd mark the sweet spots as cue points in Audiion, load in slicer (where the slices would apear on my markers) and use Chop tool and other midi editing in Piano Roll (only maybe shorten the MIDI events sto that gaps create mor stuttering).
The flexibility I was talking about is that I could now have volume, pan and filter cutoff per MIDI event, curtesy of using a FL internal.
Closer Now 2 (drum stutter)
Again with slicer and my break exported as wav, this is more than doable.
Off the Wreckord 1 (spoken vocal stutter - mix quality isn't as good here, sorry)
The effect could be achieved by MIDI stuttering the snare drum (again, chop tool in piano roll does most of the work).
BUTRT 1 (glitches in the drums and a stutter on the pad - this is more like what you do with the granulizer)
Drum stutters could be replicated by exporting the break and midi stuttering the slicer. The pad effect, as you noticed, could be duplicated using thgranulizer and some automation.
BUTRT 2 (lots of glitches in the drums)
All I hear are 16th note retriggers here :)
Chibooti EB 1 (again, stuttered/glitchy drums, this time all using a MIDI triggered sampler - so you see, I am not against this by principle, I *do* use it sometimes)
Yes, what I thought as well, since it's obviously the single drum hits being retriggered.
I think what it comes down is that you find it more comfortable doing it with audio, and I find it more comfortable using MIDI, maybe because I don't find the way FL handles audio very comfortable at all. |
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| peejunk |
| quote: | Originally posted by Reactance
Hey DigiNut !
Can u explain what is nano correction,BT uses this effect in hes music i think he invented this technique !
Cool |
I don't want to come off as a hater, bu I take BTs claims he invented something and his use of funky scientific terms like "Fourier Transform" and "nano" with a grain of salt.
I've read his interviews where he pretty much said he invented the stutter edits as well, and how he finds it amusing when some people do it now. The truth is that producers like Amon Tobin and Squarepusher abused stutters to death way before BT used them, and then I remember tracks by old jungle producers like 4 Hero or Jeremy Sylvester (as Darkus) who were stuttering back in '94/'95. |
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| Apollo303 |
Hey!!!!
I think although these discussions are so healthy and beneficial but don't you think this page was for BT and the Stutter effects he uses?!??! , I suggest we put all these discussion in a new Thread talking about whatever related to this topic , like "Using Software Vs. Hardware Stutter Effects" or "what can Fruity Loops do so far in the Stutter and Vocal Effects"...
Inspite of all that , I really like it...:D |
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| peejunk |
| quote: | Originally posted by Apollo303
Hey!!!!
I think although these discussions are so healthy and beneficial but don't you think this page was for BT and the Stutter effects he uses?!??! , I suggest we put all these discussion in a new Thread talking about whatever related to this topic , like "Using Software Vs. Hardware Stutter Effects" or "what can Fruity Loops do so far in the Stutter and Vocal Effects"...
Inspite of all that , I really like it...:D |
But why, through our discussion we've both described quite few techniques that, indeed, could be used to achieve BT-like stuttery effects. DigiNut also posted a link to an article about the technique. It's not the worst case of thread hijack I've seen, it has a lot of info, evein if it is in debate/flame form :D
Again, I will ask, is this thread about "how BT does what he does?" or "how can I achieve the same effect?"? Since I was under the impression it was the latter. |
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