Of Recordings

Last week Aaron and I were raving it up– he with his Doepfer, I with my microKorg.  We were frustrated, however, by our difficulty getting the microKorg to stay synced up.  After much investigation, I unearthed the cause and solution to our problem.

When the microKorg’s clock is set to EXT, it accepts MIDI clock from the master.  MIDI clock is a series of ticks sent at regular intervals.  The synth can calculate the master tempo from the time between ticks.  But MIDI clock contains no information about bars and beats.  (Other MIDI protocols do, but the microKorg does not accept them as far as I can tell.)  So the synth matches its tempo to the master, but it has no knowledge of how to line up the first beat with the master.  The arpeggiator might start on the beat just by chance, but it’s just as likely to start halfway between beats.

After much investigation, I discovered that you can force the microKorg to jump back to the first beat in time with your host.  Details after the jump.

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Kibibu helpfully pointed out that Fuzzpilz Oppressor is a much easier sidechain machine than BG Sidechain Dynamics. He is right, so here’s a revised tutorial. If you still want to use BG Sidechain, that tutorial is still available.

If you don’t have Oppressor 3, you need to get it from Fuzzpilz’s site. Our scenario is the same as last time: we have a kick drum and a bass line; we want the bass line volume to duck in time with the kick drum.

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There are a whole bunch of Buzz tracker machines, but Fuzzpilz UnwieldyTracker is so good I pretty much stopped using all the others. Its features are well-suited to beat slicing, among other things. Beat slicing involves chopping a drum loop into individual sounds and rearranging them to make a new beat. This tutorial will show you how.

We want to take a drum loop, fit it to our song tempo, re-arrange it to make a new beat, and apply different effects to different sounds. This example starts with a drum loop trimmed to 8 beats. If you don’t have one handy, you can use this one (right-click to save):

Example drum loop

UnwieldyTracker may not be included with your Buzz install. If not, go to Fuzzpilz site and install it first. Then we’re ready to go.

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My tutorial on sidechaining last week got quite a few hits, so I thought I would write up some more Buzz techniques.

This tutorial will teach you how to integrate an external MIDI synthesizer (or drum machine, or groovebox ..) with a Buzz song. In this scenario, I have a drum loop playing in Buzz. I want to synchronize the arpeggiator on a hardware synth– say, my beloved microKorg– to Buzz so the synth plays in time with the drum pattern. Then I want to use my favorite Buzz effects on the synth.

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This tutorial will teach you how to set up sidechain compression in Buzz using the BG Sidechain Dynamics machine. It took me forever to figure out how to do this the first time, so I wrote it up to save you the time. You’re welcome.

EDIT: Kibibu tipped me that Fuzzpilz Oppressor 3 also does sidechaining, and it’s a bit easier to set up.  Here’s this same tutorial using Oppressor instead of BG.

Here’s our initial setup. We have two tracks, a kick drum and a bass line. We want to duck the bass’s volume in time with the kick drum. (Click on any diagram to enlarge it.)

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