The Truth About 80s DRUMS (Synth Pop) 

Yes absolutely. What was especially strange about these tests though was that the random drift continued even when I took midi out of the equation and just pressed play on the drum machine. Also, I started to guess that the way the drum machines were implemented internally was actually serial (like midi) because nothing *ever* lined up and was always at least 1ms out.

Exactly. There’s another reason that’s peculiar to the Linn which is this: all of the samples had ‘dead air’ in front of them. There are lots of theories as to why this would be the case, but my guess is that Roger Linn wanted to make sure that the VCA would have time to open. However, what’s interesting is that as you define the samples the dead air (of course) gets longer. This means that the groove slightly changes depending on the drum tuning. And Prince often used very detuned claps and rimshots. I am fascinated to see/hear if the Behringer clone replicates the dead air. If it doesn’t, it won’t capture the Linn groove.

@@DistortThePreamp I didn’t know about the dead air, but that makes a lot of sense as to why those detuned sounds feel so late! I wonder if he was de-tuning primarily to get the timing effect and accepting the pitch shift as the side effect!!

Yes, without A/B testing then it's just a hypothesis. It's like "trust me, this is why". All music up until the 2000s was using crappy MIDI drifting timing, so I don't buy that is what defined the 80s sound, at all.

Yes. I’m really sorry about that. I made a previous version of the video which contained the full experiment but I couldn’t get it below 35 minutes and so, perhaps wrongly, I decided to remake the whole thing in a simpler way. The original experiments were done a couple of years ago, but the new experiments I did and filmed for the video worked as follows: - I sampled some of my drum machine sounds into the DAW - I programmed an identical pattern in (a) a midi clip in the DAW, and (b) my sequencer. (Note: I should also have done it in the drum machine which I have previously tested). - I recorded both. - Switching between the two records they sound the same, but they’re not the same as I then prove: - I take the kick-snare audio sum from both the midi audio and sequencer audio - For each of those I duplicate, layer with an offset of two beats so every kick-snare is under the previous kick-snare etc - I then flip the phase of the duplicate and show how with the midi audio it produces silence (a successful null test) and with the sequencer audio you get a phasey hollow sound that is noticeably different with every hit. - This proves that they’re different, and also different every time. And is also a perfect explanation for why DAW beats sound different to beats that were made in an old fashioned way using drum machines or sequencers. - I also reference some science which explained how, although humans typically perceive sounds that occur within 5ms of each other as occurring at the same time, our brains are highly attuned, albeit subconsciously, to the sound of phase shift because it’s how we perceive front to back, and from an evolutionary perspective it was an important part of staying alive when there were predators behind you. - Thus, in a slightly humorous way, one might say we have evolved to be able to distinguish between DAW beats and drum machine/sequenced beats, even if our modern brains can’t explain what exactly we’re hearing that’s different. - Finally I note that for people with proper training, they can pick out the differences and demonstrate with a blind A/B test. This last sequence was planned and demoed but not filmed. I’ve done a lot of thinking about this, and I am coming to the conclusion that I may entirely re-make this video in a few months with more of the science and demonstration. In the meantime, sorry for the hand waving.

This was a suggested video for me, and I’m quite interested. I appreciate the thoughtful response, so I’ve gone ahead and subscribed so I can see the follow-up. Greatly anticipated.

Well this is true. I alluded to humanisers, right? (Or did I cut that bit?) I can’t remember whether a M4L humaniser can advance as well as delay midi, but if it can’t than the obvious workaround is to use track delay to advance the track and then double the amount of humanisation. Although as I’m writing this, it probably doesn’t matter that much - the main point IMO is capturing not so much the timing drift (which is what humanisers were intended to do) but rather the way the phase relationship changes between two overlayed sounds as a result of a differing drift in thei alignment. Great point.

So the timing feeling humanly natural doesn't matter as much as each drum hit having some unique quality caused by phase "issues". This is, i imagine, why people still refer to this era of music as rigid.

Oh I didn't know that! And of course 8.3ms = 16.6 maximum delta. I was aware that every midi note had to be at least 1ms apart, and there is no such thing as a midi chord (because it's a serial protocol), but I should obviously have read the spec. Duh.

Interestingly the Juno 106's voice CPU has a "cycle time" in which it updates all six voices and the "global" parameters (noise, master VCA, PWM, resonance, and the various switches) is 4.3ms, but by the time the assigner CPU has done its work and it's told the voice board over its MIDI-like internal link, it averages out at about 6ms latency between "Note On" message and sound coming out.

I very much appreciate this! Thank you so much for the comment 🙏🙏🙏

I was stunned when I discovered this. As I said in the video, I spent about a month trying to solve the ‘problem’ till I did, and then realised it wasn’t actually a problem. I honestly don’t think even the 80s producers know this. I was out with someone who used to work at Trevor Horn’s studio with all of the usual suspects, and it was certainly news to him.

That also blew my mind

I just noticed this yesterday myself when I set my DAW to 140 BPM, the drum machine synced up nicely, but sometimes it dropped to 139 BPM for a fraction of a second then jump back to 140. It happens relatively often.

Thank you! The MPC is really quite special sounding. Really great workflow too that doesn’t get in the way of creativity. I don’t know much about the new ones - it’s potentially a bit over-complicated - but there are still a lot of great records being made on the 2000XL.

Thank you so much! That’s very kind!

Oh thank you! Old fashioned vocal processing, particularly country, is something of a lost art. Technical limitations made it impossible to do the kind of processing and overdubs that became standard even by the 70s. So if you wanted to change the EQ, you’d better select a different mic. Similarly, rather than rely on compression, the recording engineer would learn the song and literally ride the vocal fader (that sets the recording level) during the singer’s performance. It was a completely different world.

Yeah, I was so surprised about this. I had assumed, like you're alluding to, that the timing discrepancies were to do with either tape stretching, or general clock drift. I was astonished to find that the drum instruments were drifting independently even when you just hit play, in other words with no midi involved at all. So when you add in SMPTE clock, etc etc etc, it all sounds very non-robotic.

Haha - thank you! I was so staggered that it even existed. I mean they’ve all got quartz clocks. But turns out the clocks for each instrument drift independently anyway. And the irony is, it sounds fantastic.

That’s absolutely correct. I find the hazel responds better to the different frequency gamut.

Agree, I have two.

So you sound like you’re properly mathsy, and therefore I don’t think it would be a random linear deviation around the mean. You might want to try a power distribution with an upper bound, but there’s another thing which is that none of the hits ever occur together and are always at least 1ms apart. That’s probably because the internal drum machine sequencer is modelled on midi and is serial. All lots of fun. Regarding hardware sequencers, I absolutely LOVE my Squarp Pyramid! Unfortunately they’ve retired it and are trying to move to their next gen model which looks great but is a bit physically big for me. So my recommendation is a second hand Pyramid. At some stage I’ll make videos showing my workflow, but suffice to say it works excellently for electronic pop and rock. Hit me up on my email in the description if you have any specific questions…

You’re absolutely right about 12” mixes from the 80s. Not to descend into a history lesson, but the commercial reason they were made is that the chart rules recognised multiple sales (up to a limit) as separate units sold. So if you could persuade a punter to buy the 7” and 12” then you would notch up two sales. Therefore there was huge pressure for 12” versions to be produced of everything and very little budget to do them properly. I know several producers who used to make them in an afternoon just by basic razor blade splicing. They would mute the vocal and let the mix play, then add a middle bit, then repeat from the beginning with the vocal added. Or something easy like that. I know Tape Ops who were told to “do the edits” because the producer couldn’t be bothered, and sometimes the edits weren’t fantastic. “Shake The Disease” (Depeche Mode) has a very bad edit in the middle of the 12” version that I always found annoying.

😂😂😂 There was a lot more science in the demo of this video that got abandoned! But is was 40 minutes of me drawing waveforms and explaining null tests and phase shifts and even I was getting bored 😂

Oh excellent! Yes - all about there being no masterclock! So glad you liked the video :)

Such an awesome comment! So glad you enjoyed the video!

Oh interesting! So you are taking identical samples and exploiting the fact that when they layer the sum sounds different because of phase differences? That's fascinating! And let me return the comment -- now I think about it, it makes perfect sense in your industry too...

@@DistortThePreampSometimes identical samples, sometimes similar samples. Sometimes I’ll cut off the first one once the second one kicks in, kind of like “choking” it in drum machine terms. We do this for explosives, gunshots, or anything big and transient all the time. Theres a huge variety of sound you can achieve when playing with very short amounts of time offsets. I remember when I first learned this, a more experienced sound designer taught me and it absolutely blew my mind how much a few ms could change the timbre of the sound.

Oh that sound designer would have been talking about exactly the same thing I was. It’s extraordinary once you witness it with your own ears. I’ve never done any game sound design but it sounds fascinating. Your description of ‘choke groups’ is obviously very applicable to music…

Fun. I drag my tracks in the daw a few ms to the front or back and then repeat till i get what i like most. But i should repeat it more later in the track 😎

This is cool to read

Yes. Audio cable lengths are not all that significant becasuse they’re traveling at the speed of light, but audio through the air is obviously about 1ms per foot, and midi messages are spaced at least 1ms apart and, given that midi can’t accommodate chords) this means that a four note chord contains a spread of at least 3ms. As you say, this can add up to quite significant alignment issues that simply don’t exist if you programme inside a DAW. It just sounds different.

I do a similar thing - I start by programming in my sequencers, then I track in and slave back to the sequencers using compensated beat clock. It’s all right enough. But nowhere near as tight as putting stuff on the grid inside a daw and hitting the render button. And this IMO is a good thing.

@@DistortThePreamp what does "track in and slave back to the sequencers using compensated beat clock" mean?

Exactly - no graphical waveform readouts 😂 That’s why I wonder whether I’m one of the few people to ever have done these tests. But I’ve decided that I very much like the sound of the drum machines.

Ah yes. I had a wizard cast a spell which means that the mic no longer needs to be pointing at my mouth to pick up perfect audio. Very useful for RU-vid videos.

Very, very good idea

So here’s the thing. I know it’s a huge general statement, but I’ve kind of come to believe it’s much more of a significant factor than people realise. It’s not actually midi errors - it’s the nature of the way hardware operating systems run inside sequencers including drum machines which seems to be serial. And the result is *not* delay, it’s an unpredictable shift that can be forwards or backwards and makes more of a difference to the sound of combined instruments than it does the timing. When I play the same drum pattern made up of samples (so they’re all the same) and I listen to two versions, one on the grid, and one as a drum machine played it, then I can’t really hear the timing difference but I can hear the difference in sound. I don’t think this has ever been widely understood, and it’s possible nobody has ever analysed this. And to me it’s more relevant than any of the sound selections for the following reason: if I make a facsimile of an 80s song but snap everything to the grid it doesn’t sound quite right; but conversely if I use modern synth sounds and inappropriate reverbs but programme it in a hardware sequencer then it *does* sound like the 80s. And it’s specifically the 80s because it’s the narrow period when producers where syncing to tape using SMPTE but before digital recording came in properly in the 90s. So at the very least I would say that this is necessary if not sufficient. I don’t blame you at all for your comment. If I was watching this video I would spit out my coffee and say that I was either being ridiculous or that I didn’t know what was talking about. But I can tell you from my own experience that there was nothing I could do to make Ableton or Pro Tools sound like the 80s (and I use hardware vintage synths), and yet whatever I do with my hardware sequencer I can’t make the drums sound modern. Ah well. Totally legit comment btw. Sorry to ramble. I don’t expect to convince you, but please don’t think I’m just pumping out click bait!

Oh that’s amazing! Thank you! And of course you’re completely right about hardware emulation. So many tiny things.

Yes, this is what I used to do. We all used to talk about midi being ‘sloppy’ and we’re obsessed with being ‘sample accurate’. I’ve now gone the other way 😂

Hahaha! I think Espen has a copyright claim on that 😂😂😂 Thank you though…

Oh brilliant! I think the TR-8S is a great choice. With drum machines I’m a huge fan of trying to ‘perform’ with them - using mutes, solos, filters, etc. And the TR-8S is really good at that. My top tip would probably be to go easy on the fx. They sound like ear candy in headphones but live I would use delay as an occasional effect and reverb pretty much never. Obviously the filter should be used all the time though ;) And the S3000 is great. I have a proper 88 key piano but it’s not rigged up in my studio because I don’t have space for it. And I really miss it. If you’re a ‘player’ you really need those extra octaves. Let me know how you get on!

@@DistortThePreamp you know what else TR-8S is great at? Being an Ableton controller. You basically get up to 11 channels with dedicated volume fader, filter knob, reverb and delay! But unfortunately I have mot found a way to launch abd stop clips with it, so I am getting a launchpad mini next.

@@riccello oh that’s interesting! I used to use the Akai APC40 before I went dawless. It was really fantastic because not only could you launch clips but it had tight integration with things like effects racks. So from memory you could pre-map effect chains to racks and macros and then control those very easily. The rotary controllers were also very well done - infinite turning with leds to show values etc. It also had the A/B function implemented which not many people use in Ableton but which I used to use quite a lot.

@@DistortThePreamp btw, I was so inspired by your video, that I researched a way to simulate random phase drift in Ableton. Basically, you can do two things. Fiest, you can Add a delay to each channel and set a range from 1 to 20ms. Then you can automate it using LFO. You can also randomize LFO rate. Second thing you can automate the same way is phase shift between left and right channel.

Ah - randomising the LFO is a great idea! 20ms sounds a bit much though. I would set the max to maybe 12ms. And maybe have it changing value every 16th note. And obviously apply it separately to every drum. That’s a really interesting solution. An additional tweak would be this: suppose you’ve set the max drift to 12ms, then you could also set a negative delay of the whole track to 6ms. So that the note was drifting around the grid line. And I don’t reckon you’re gonna have to do anything with the phase - although it would be interesting. But the mere fact that the instruments are changing their alignment slightly every time is gonna make the whole thing sound different to a DAW. As I think I said in the video, it wasn’t so much that I could hear the sound, it was much more that I could hear the contrasting sterility of the strict grid.

That sounds very similar to my workflow!

Well put.

Not quite as it would mean the offset never varied. But I’m sure you could rig something up with a slightly randomised groove… :)

”Humanize” quantization found in many software

@@DistortThePreampnot even if you did to each individual drum sample? Thanks for the response love your channel 💜

Yes, that’s exactly right. Very important not to spend hours fixing and editing and you can re-take in about 5-20 minutes.

Oh you’re very welcome! So pleased you enjoyed the video :)

​@@DistortThePreampAs Always! I wanted to add the fully warm analog signal path with that noise and humming of gears da-converters. So yes, it all have an effect

Hahaha. I think the trick is to make it drift enough so the sound changes (almost imperceptibly) but not so much that you hear the timing errors. Most people obviously couldn’t care less lol

@@DistortThePreamp I think its more a case that people's reactions drift and change almost imperceptibly S'hard to fix em down

Funny. Ableton can t do straight. Now you tell me they go na add drift?

Ableton and most DAWs already have humanize % to grid or equivalent, wondering how this is any different?

@@AudioLomtik Exactly. Cubase has been able to randomize /humanize for a long time. No need to ditch the computer.

Oh that’s extremely interesting! And they’re not aligned, right? So the drift is on a per instrument basis? I think 5% sounds like a lot. I don’t know how the percentage is being calculated but you really only need a few ms of drift to get the effect. So glad you like the channel. Really appreciate the comment :)

@@DistortThePreamp That's right- Not Aligned. The Humanize dial does not give you a number (I wish it did but I'm guesstimating, based on a full turn) so I sometimes zoom to a fixed amount and eyeball the instrument displacement.

That’s a totally solid technique. There’s definitely a point when the brain can’t quite hear the timing differences but it can sense that the sounds are changing and the music comes ‘alive’. Very important IMO.

Thank you! 🙏

Ah the magic microphone. Those vintage microphones pick up perfect audio without having to be plugged in 😂

@@DistortThePreamp Just ask Milli Vanilli.

@@DistortThePreamp lol :)

Well, they’re all computer sequencers really. The Roland R8 has a computer in it, as does my hardware sequencer. But what I really meant to say was don’t programme midi on the grid in a DAW if you want it to sound like the 80s. I used to use Ataris and they were very tight, but you still get an astonishing amount of drift that’s generated from the machine doing the sound source. Midi itself is a serial protocol so in the best case if you have six drum hits happening at the same time they are 1ms apart which is 6ms from the first to the last. And of course the stacking order is different every time.

Oh absolutely. And btw the polybrute is fantastic, isn’t it! Very good product from a very good company.

Both the Proteurs 1 Orchstra module and FB-01 are fantastic machines! I swear by my Proteus 1 module (I’ve got the Pop/Rock) and use it on every session. You have to use other stuff too (obviously) like analog, FM, etc etc, but the sounds are amazing. And I bet you’re right about people doing the time shifting as an after effect. It would probably have to be at the daw level because you would need negative as well as positive delay, but it’s all possible. I could probably even rig something up to get close.

That’s what I would have thought, but actually it’s baked into the drum machines. Those measurements were just from me programming a pattern and hitting play. No midi involved. Totally erratic.

@@DistortThePreamp Makes sense. Something that wouldn't have been on my radar at first. At second glance, of course, the processing speed of the commonly used 8-bit CPUs was also limited in order to fire samples perfectly on a grid.

Yes. It's particularly ironic with the Roland R8 drum machine -- that was promoted as having extremely high resolution. Instead of 32 notes per bar you could do 960 so you could, effectively, programme actual triplets and very detailed rhythms. Who knew that the actual timing error margin was way over this resolution. Not that it's not legit -- it's all legit. But, honestly, nobody knew, because nobody checked.

@@DistortThePreamp it would be really interesting if Roland knew that their older machines had timing inconsistencies, found the R8 to be too precise and re-introduced the inconsistencies so as not to lose the magic.

That’s what I assumed, but it turns out it’s similar if not exactly the same. The equipment I tested was a Roland R8 and Behringer RD9, and in terms of sequencers the Pyramid Squarp and Arturia Beatstep Pro. The RD9 was the best behaved when I ran it cold (ie not sequenced) but even then it wasn’t on the grid and the beats drifted against each other. This was why it sent me into a tailspin. I was so confused. Thankfully it sounds great.

This is scientific fact. Hardware sequencers are fabulous!

Very good strategy. There’s really very little you can’t do well in a DAW, it just depends on how you use it. ;)

Ah yes. There are many occasions when I played a part badly. Obviously as I explained to everyone this was entirely deliberate and just to capture that elusive 80s feel.

Great question. They’re jittering so that the offset varies each time, including the direction. Rarely more than 7ms in either direction, but also never ever aligned. The fact that they’re never aligned leads me to believe that drum machines have some sort of serial architecture and there’s a minimum spacing of 1ms (similar to midi). It’s also random rather than an oscillator. For the experiments I ran the drum machine(s) on their own, and also as sound sources sequenced by external sequencers. I didn’t go into the detail in video, but tye timing got worse when external sequencers were throwing more notes at the machine. That seemed to matter less when the machine was internally programmed. All fascinating. I freaked out when I discovered all of this, but now I’ve decided that it’s part of my production workflow.

Interesting that external sequencing causes bigger jitter, and it's (apparently) proportional to the amount of notes. With some back of the envelope maths, MIDI is 32.1kbps, it's 10-bits per byte (with start & stop bits), and note on & note off are each 3 bytes, so sending or receiving a note or off will take almost exactly 1ms. Assuming everything is perfect and instant (when is it ever?), if your sequencer is sending a note-on message on three different channels on the same bus, the first and third note-on messages will be received 2ms apart. If in your sequence there are preceding notes ending right as the new ones start then for each note-on the sequence will first send a note-off and that 2ms doubles to 4ms. 4ms is equivalent to 250hz, so you're definitely in the realm of phasing. Very cool!

Yeah, this is exactly right. My suspicion is that internally the drum machines’ own sequences are implemented in a way that is either straightforward midi or similar to midi. Even the modern Behringer RD9 is incapable of spitting out hits that land together, and that’s when you press play on an internal sequence with no midi. Everything is always at least 1ms apart which I think is telling. And when I’ve got a huge sequence running for a song I might easily have 10-20 things happening on the same beat, albeit on different midi channels. I like the timing drift but that can get a bit too sloppy, so I often turn off the extraneous stuff when it comes time to track everything in, just to keep it a little tighter.

@@adammassacre4715 Yes, this is very valid. In my experience when I’m programming intensively, it starts off sounding great but if all the midi becomes too overloaded then it crosses into ‘sloppy’ territory. What I do is ignore the sloppiness and ‘go with it’ but when it comes time to track, I only track the rhythm and bass parts, and then do a sync’s overdub of the others. If it’s really bad then I might resort to tracking the drum and bass separately. The worst it ever got was when my drum machine started to drop snare because it was getting confused with the conga part 😂

And I was thinking a short sample of the sound change was coming…drifted vs snapped to grid

Sure - sorry if that wasn’t clear. Yes the sounds were from the same drum machine. And the drift was NOT the same. They shifted against each other every time. This was also what I saw when reviewing the actually multi-tracks from the 80s. Mental.

I did a much longer version of this video that was more detailed, but decided that I had to simplify the story a bit as it was getting too technical. Hope I didn’t gloss over the detail too much. But all the tests were properly done with lots of different methods tried.

Yes, that’s true. I was a bit unfair about computers. Humanisers should do it if they’re applied to all the instruments, plus, and perhaps more importantly, there really isn’t anything wrong with ‘grid music’. I’m a huge fan of deadmau5 and all of his stuff is locked in very tight with no drift (although he uses a lot of evolving sounds). Still, the ‘computer is dead’ joke was too good to miss ;)

Hi! Not quite because that would create a fixed delay. I’ve been thinking about how to do this in Live and I *think* that the key might be to use a neutral 16th note groove template but use the percentage option to randomly shift them within an error margin. I haven’t tried but I reckon this would do it. And you should absolutely use this on every instrument so they behave independently. You would probably want to do some tests to see what percentage moves the notes +/- 7ms (max) but once you’d figured it out, you could use it every time. Personally I would then print the audio, although that’s not everybody’s cup of tea. Although noting how you describe yourself as an ‘old producer’ that might be up your street too ;) If you try this, let me know how it goes. FWIW I use several daws and the only I would consider doing this kind of ‘funny business’ in would be Ableton…

@@DistortThePreamp Yea using the groove pool is defo a good way to go ive used it every time 😊 I like the idea of shifting randomness to it nice. Yea old being born in early 70’s 😂 Took me 10 years on and off to get a good sound. Always learning but enjoying the journey. Your videos are no BS and i really find them very useful thank you. Yes i am that kinda old nerd that would do that 😂 Respect 💫

The worst mistake i made was not setting up the delay compensation within Live. It threw me out for a while why i could t get a good drum sound? It was bloody out of phase duh! 😂 Anywho catch you on the next one

Hahaha! Yeah. There was a version where I apologised for the science 😂

It’s definitely jitter, but it can’t be midi jitter because there was actually no midi involved. In some of the tests I just literally hit play on the drum machine. No midi anywhere. That was one of the things I found so shocking. So in other words it’s internal jitter baked in to the device. And you’re absolutely correct to refer to it as “jitter” because it’s not always a delay - sometimes hits arrive early.

Yeah, this is of course absolutely true. I originally had a segment in the beginning where I explicitly stated that my assumption was that the questioner was talking about electronic pop from the mid-eighties. Because, as you say, otherwise you’re stacking Bauhaus next to Springsteen.

Especially when the phase drift actually sounds good! I think most people instinctively know that programming midi on the grid in a daw has a certain sound to it, and that sound isn’t the 80s. But I would never have guessed why before I did these experiments.

Yes. Although Vince moves everything on to the grid - he’s very much the special case. There’s nothing wrong with budget equipment!

@@DistortThePreamp aww nice one,, great to hear a little bit of info on Vince. It’s hard to find anything about him. And deffo love my budget gear. I get actual real goosebumps when I’m in my studio ( box room 😎) pretending to be depeche mode ! Thanks again for everything. It’s made such a difference to me

I’m so pleased. Yup - I’m certain you don’t need to buy anything more (unless you want to). Your £30 midi timepiece thing by MOTU sounds like a very sensible budget ;)

Brilliant! The only thing you want to make sure (which I’m sure you’re doing) is to make sure that all the parts are humanised independently of each other, and I would also do a bit of experimentation to make sure the drift is never more than 7ms in either direction - you should be aiming for 2-5ms most of the time. The weird thing (in my experience) is that it affects the sound more than the feel and it’s almost imperceptible, except when you suddenly go back to the grid and then you can really sense that something’s off. It’s like the music has suddenly become flat. What I’m trying to say is don’t keep pushing the humanise until you can hear it - that would almost certainly be far too much. As I write this I realise I must sound like a total snake oil salesman, telling you to do something but “not so much that you can hear it” 😂

I love my Pyramid. Most enjoyable and workflow-friendly sequencer over ever used. And that includes several hardware sequencers and DAWs.

This is true. In which case the computer wakes from the dead and comes alive ;)

Thank you!

Oh that’s a very good plan. Interesting workflow. Will sound very different indeed.

@@DistortThePreamp sounds tedious but i found it the best workflow to get the results i want, none of my harware sequencers have screens so edits at the note level can be a pain, although i do like using my step sequencer to jot out ideas, ti like the computer sequencer for are editing (prog changes, cc data, sysex) and saving work, then i record that to the machines, works a treat. : )

Thank you! Glad you’re interested in the new wave/goth sounds - those are also fascinating and quite easy to make. With lots of little known tricks. There was such a huge overlap in players with John McGeoch leaving the Banshees, Robert Smith taking over and learning his parts and techniques, and then taking those back to The Cure, and McGeoch also being part of Visage and influencing and being influenced by Midge Ure, etc etc etc - all very incestuous.

@@DistortThePreamp yeah it's kinda funny, I set out to make solid dance music but went this way after consuming a lot of oldskool punk and basically taking it from there. It's been interesting to say the least.

That all sounds extremely healthy!

Yes it would be very easy. It should be done at a per instrument level (ie snare affected independently of the kick etc) and the timing drift should never be more than about 6ms in each direction. But it would be pretty easy to do. You might be able to do it in Ableton, for example, using a neutral 16th note groove and then adding a random element to the timing.

This is correct. The riah was more zhoosh because of the spray. ;)

Ah, sorry if this wasn’t clear. The error isn’t consistent at all. Each drum is varying a different amount each time so the alignment between, say, the kick and the snare is never the same twice. Which means that it sounds slightly different every time…

I honestly don’t know. The clock would be very tight once it had been released since it would be travelling at the speed of light, but I wonder how accurate the clock itself would be? I would previously have assumed that it was as accurate as a digital watch or DAW. Now I’m not so sure. I’m reminded of something Vince Clarke once said (in a very short conversation I had with him) to the effect that “you always have to move the waveforms”.

And it works very very poorly. And actually sounds very much like what it is. Randomness.

@@vladv5126 well that's exactly what this video describes though, random offsets from the grid. You just have to set it so that the offsets are no more than a couple of milliseconds.

Thank you!

Very happy to get this comment! 🙏🙏🙏

Well, on proper systems there shouldn’t really have been wow, flutter, or stretch, but the separate passes thing could have been significant. I do the same thing in my studio - I record the basic tracks and then run in overdubs using sync. As it turns out it was pretty much a matter of personal preference whether or not separate passes were used for the transfer. I remember that the Stock, Aitken, Waterman team used to transfer the Linn kick soloed because they though it sounded tighter, but as we now know, how even knows what that means when you analyse the alignments. I don’t know about the Sarm guys, but I’m talking to one of them in a couple of weeks, so I’ll ask!

I would do randomised timing and let the phase take care of itself, but yeah I reckon that should work. I’d do it in every instrument, limit it to no more than 6ms in each direction, and I would probably also print the audio (though you might not wanna do that). And of course this is only if you want it to sound like the 80s. Grid music can be amazing. deadmau5 is all on the grid for example. But I honestly think this is roughly one hundred per cent of the sound.

@@DistortThePreamp yeah depends what you are after. Good point about rendering audio, otherwise hard to have anything repeatable 😅 but i guess its part of the fun if it doesn’t stay consistent

Yes, I think this is a very valid criticism. I was really just trying to answer the question “What would you do when you were recording to make it sound like…” but I can see the pitfall you’re pointing out. And you’re also right to say that it’s an AI’s wet dream, and it’s not just about the sound. I certainly have no personal interest in rigging up a whole load of ‘vintage’ sounds and creating a pastiche. So well said.

@@DistortThePreamp yes! thanks for the reply, i got it that the video is more to instruct this aspect of rhythm/audio deviation and some people aren't aware of it. My idea with the comment was more for those who gonna read is that things go waaaay deeper when we started thinking about "why something X sounds like X" Anyway, love the channel and content! Keep it on!

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Here’s what I would do: 1. Make sure your drums (and other midi instruemnts) are all on separate tracks. 2. Load up a neutral 16th note groove from the groove pool that basically does nothing 3. Add some randomisation to the timing. You might have to experiment to make sure that the randomisation sticks to within about 6ms either way. 4. Apply this to each of the drums and instrument tracks. I haven’t tried this, but it should work. The important thing is that the instruments and drums drift AGAINST each other

@@DistortThePreamp thank you I will try this! A producer named Noisia who produces some of the best sounding drum and bass tracks stresses his preference for making things sound organic and in motion so I am excited to implement your info as I struggle making my sound feel alive (let alone sound good!). I love the 80’s sound, my doodles always gravitate towards that style, thank you for all the videos! Your Duran Duran arpeggio video was amazing.

Oh thank you! Yes, I think people focus on timing to make things sound organic, but overlook the microscopic sound changes (that are sometimes a byproduct also of timing). I’ve had so many people asking me the “how do I do this in Ableton?” question that I might take a deep breath and figure it out. I think it will work, but if it doesn’t then another possibility (maybe a last resort) would be for me to create and give away a whole load of 16th note grooves (taken from my actual setup) for people to use, but with the idea that no two instruments use the same groove. Hopefully it won’t come to that because that sounds like a rather over-elaborate solution. Do let me know how you get on though.

Yes, totally a joke ;)

@@bogdonovichbustedcasey170 Thank you! 🙏🙏🙏

No argument. I know there are exceptions, and I know it’s a generalisation, but as a generalisation it’s a good one. Everything becomes easier, better sounding, even cheaper. About the only genuine drawbacks are things like inability to recall (which sometimes is a good thing) and the fact that you need space. I can’t take my studio to a cafe like I can with my laptop, but that’s pretty much the only thing I don’t like…

Exactly! Stick on every instrument including the separate drum hits. And make sure it never exceeds 7ms in each direction (which might mean 14ms in a single direction)

All basically true but you would be amazed how much 80s music was actually digitally recorded. Digital multitracks (24 and 48) arrived in the early 80s and a lot of the big studios had them in at least one of their rooms. Songs To The Big Chair for example was digitally recorded. I’m personally a bit of a sceptic that the recording medium was the main factor - however I believe that the workflow made a huge amount of difference.

Kate Bush thought it made a difference, she went back to recording in analogue

Yes, lots of people have agreed with this. Although that’s about the artist and their preference. The question I suppose is whether or not somebody can hear just by listening to a record whether it was recorded on tape or digitally. Some of the classic 80s records were recorded digitally, so it’s probably not likely that tape is a part of the ‘80s sound’. Plus, ironically, one of those digital records is actually featured on the thumbnail for the video where Espen talks about using tape. But I’m really not making an argument for or against - only that I think it might be bogus to talk about tape as being intrinsic to 80s sound.

​@DistortThePreamp You will have to record a demo 1 version using 80s technology and on tape and the same song using digital equipment, and see if people can tell the difference. As a personal preference, I think the bass and drums lose something when recorded in digital although that could be down to the clarity of digital recording

@@DistortThePreampI also read that “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” was slightly sped up in the mastering phase which is why people have a hard time playing along to it in normal tuning. It’s slightly sharp. I wonder if this slight deviation of tuning also contributed to the sound?

At last! You are literally the first person to notice 😂 In another video the mic flag said “Bona Cackle” and I really expected somebody to say something like “Bona to vada your dolly old eek”. Then again, it’s an extremely British thing ;)

Exactly. It’s how I travel back through time ;)

Just sent you a message about this. But you can understand why I roll my eyes when everyone talks about how 80s records sound ‘that way’ because of tape. Songs From The Big Chair (Tears for Fears) was recorded digitally. And both So (Peter Gabriel) and Brothers in Arms (Dire Straits) had an entirely digital process and the CDs were labelled “DDD”. And I think we can agree that those records sound pretty ‘eighties’. So one would be forgiven for wondering if certain people knew what they were talking about.

​@@DistortThePreamp When you said in your video about Songs From the Big Chair I started my research and found about the Sailing single. I got a friend that was a big sound engineer here in Brazil (recorded Jão Gilberto and all the greatest) and always he say to me how analog tape was horrible to use. But now you can find A LOT of people that call themselves "sound engineers" on RU-vid saying that digital is crap and analog is great. It's terrible how the history is being changed day after day by these kind of information.

Yes. In a way it’s funny how RU-vid is full of people who do so well pushing these ideas that not only are not true, they’re often the opposite of what was true. Ah well.