BT, Logic and Time Correction

Ott, I was reading this interview http://emusician.com/ar/emusic_sonic_surgeon/index.htm with BT and he was mentioning that a group of people, Real World Studios, himself and others have a group where they discuss Logic keyboard commands and share a particular key command setup so they can swap studios or whatever. I was wondering if you had access to such a key command set and could you post it to the forum.

Secondly in the same interview he goes on about time correcting and nano time correcting, what is he talking about? What exactly needs time correcting so much that it takes two months per song? And how would this apply to anything that I am doing? Do all tracks at some point need time correction or is BT being uber-geekish.

 

Don't know nuffink about it mate. I keep my autoload.lso and my logic5.prf files on a keyring usb drive so I have them wherever I go.

I regularly employ a technique I call "nano-frequency amplitude alignment" and it can take 2 months to complete one tune.

You probably call it "EQ".

"Nano time correction" sounds like a very poncey way of saying "Moving things around to make them funky."

Sometimes, despite all graphical and numeric evidence to the contrary, some sounds can sound as if they are late or early and I regularly slip things about by ear until they sound right.

I hear it all the time in other people's tunes - "Hmmm - that snare drum sounds a bit late..." and sometimes some snare drums sound late even when they're not. Thats when you have to trust your ears over and above the evidence of your monitor screen.

Musicians do this without thinking - drummers dragging the rhythm or speeding up into choruses etc - and bass players playing late to make stuff sound heavy. You can make a bassline sound deeper by making it later, and you can make a tune appear to be faster than it is by making the hi-hats fractionally early, but dressing it up to sound all technical and giving it a name like "Nano Time Correction" just sounds a bit wanky to me.

File under "geeky techno-toss" drivelled out in the course of a tech-mag interview to an equally geeky [and apparently easily impressed] journalist.

 

ohhhh don't forget ye shovel win ya wanny go ta werk :juggle:

 

Thanks, that helped explain somewhat but I am still kind of confused.
At what stage of the mix is this NTC done?

How is this done? Is it a matter of selecting a section of audio and stretching or shrinking it to fit and auditory space or moving a section as is?

Are all tracks bounced down and then hacked oops corrected as audio files in a DAW because it sounds like BT is doing this on the "final" mix in an audio editor and if he is, then surely a nano correct here is a nano incorrect everywhere else following.

 

I think you're falling for a bunch of "techno-babble".

He's just moving individual tracks [sounds] about so they sit better.

Everyone does that don't they?

"NTC" is just Brian's way of making it sound mysterious and scientific.

 

I guess so he can write a book about it.

 

I always go into the sample editor and pull the anchor right at the start of the transient of the sample. I mute everything besides the kick and snare and one by one allign fast/high transient parts to the drums (I make breakbeat)... some times that means that I have to go "inside" to the next 0 cross point of a sample until the flabbyness goes away and everything is dead tight.
I started doing this only 1 year ago and I've gotten so anal with timing nowdays...Midi on my PC seems even worse now than its ever been...

Peace out.

 

i agree ott... i like to roll samples around till they fit in perfect - to give that jauntiness in the mix - all it takes is a few ticks...

;-)

Andrew
:peace:

 

I got the impression he was on about something a bit different to that Ott -

You know how nuendo (+sx??) 2 have "full plugin delay compensation", so that audio, when routed down different paths with different fx, stays sample accurate?

I always thought he was meaning he did a sort of manual PDC, ie lined up multiple things, which are going in and out of various busses or sends, to sample accurate alignment

which i file under :blink: as it is... if it turns out he just means "moving things til they sound good"... thats even more :blink: !

 

Just reading the article now...

"One comes away from talking to BT convinced that he's not only a pioneer of new and different ways to use digital processes such as waveform editing and time stretching, but that he uses them with a level of detail that's truly remarkable."

FFS! Same as nearly everyone else then! I won't bother with any more quotes, but a few things this overinflated balloon of a man says made me LOL - talk about building yourself up :no:

 

Bit of a shame that, after all that wanking about, 99% of his records sound so average.

 

Yeah, but as we're all aware, averageness sells in spades... :sad:

J.

 

:o has he been on the :shrooms: too much??

How can note values not exist, and yet also play, and be heard!!

Sax.

 

an look out for his side project ... 02





(cringe)

 

Dose this have any thing to do with Latancey?
I have resently upgraded to logic 5.5 and found that in one of my old tunes automated fx occure before the drawn line of automation.
Don't know why this is though.

 

Nah it has more to do with positioning of the sounds and how they will interact with each other. Getting them to sit tight, I think this NTC is in the audio realm and not midi, thought I could be wrong.

BT obfuscates matters by saying he invented this NTC thing with unreal note timing and things like "there are literally 50 different approaches to time correcting, depending on the source material. I'll use a different time-stretch algorithm for fuzz guitar, for repetitive wave cycles, as opposed to ones that have a lot of upper and harmonic content. I'll cut things that have a lot of subharmonic activity in them off-axis, and conjoin things off-axis instead of doing fade-ins and fade-outs. It's such a crazy technique."

At the end of the day though I did listen to some of his newer tracks and can't say that I was that impressed (streaming audio though), in fact I switched it off while playing. I wish him all the best though.


Psyfi, is it every track where the automation is starting before its grapical representation? You may want to check delay compensation in the sound card prefs or if it is on a single track it may be delay params in the param box up in the left of the arrange page... Maybe, I don't have Logic open and am kind of guessing.

 

Its just on one track. Actually its only the automation of one vst on that trak where is most obvious and only a little bit on another on. Still I have moved things around a bit and it sounds closer now although it dose seem a little different each time a play it but that could just be my brain fucking up.

 

yeah I've heard some (released) tracks where a sound has a slowish attack (or maybe it's just something in the sound itself) so when it's aligned perfectly with the beat, it actually sounds like it's late. It's really annoying to listen to - and all it takes is a small shift left.

Have to admit I hadn't thought of slightly advancing the hi-hats for effect. That sounds like a good trick (in moderation).

RedZebra

 

logic also has this delay compensation you speak of. good for using me creamware card in xtc mode - gotta get into the scope mode next... nyone else here using a creamware card?