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Sunday, 21 December 2003
Where is 1 (Reclock) ::
While going through my archives I was struck by how often I’d begun transforming improvisations into compositions using a tool called Reclock. I’d been recording my improvisations in free time, without a click, to get a human feel. Doing further work with them was difficult without a concept of where the bars and beats were. So in about 1988 or 89, I wrote Reclock. On top of the improvisation, I’d record a click track, playing the quarter notes, export a MIDI File, and then Reclock would do the math and spit out a new MIDI File with tempo change events to preserve the original timing. Dave Oppenheim later incorporated a version of it into Opcode’s sequencer, Vision. It seems so obvious now, but back then it was a revelation. I could either keep the tempo changes and the human feel, get rid of them all and create a more rigid feel, or something in between.
By the late 90's I had forgotten about Reclock.
I recorded a MIDI improvisation one night in Prague last month, and began composing on top of it earlier this week. The rhythmic complexity of this piece had me stuck. The basic track was constant, fast rhythmic patterns. Where were the downbeats? I got zoomed way in—"I’m repeating 7/16's there.” I thought, “ah, Logic’s got Reclock too” and slowly began building a click track. I got through the first minute or two of the piece, and realized that I was going to have to have a click for every eighth note ... or worse, every sixteenth note if it turned out that I had a stray measure of 9/16 somewhere. Too much work!
It occurred to me that it would be cool if I only had to enter the downbeats, and then somehow tell Reclock “this bar is 4/4, that one is 7/8, that one is 2/4.” The trouble with being a programmer is that an idea like this can quickly turn into a project. And lo, 18 hours later (including about 6 hours of sleep), I had a program to do all that.
Now I was starting to intellectually understand the piece.
I took yet one more detour; what if I quantized the original improv and made the tempo steady? No, that sucked all the life out it.
It finally occurred to me to turn 90 degrees to the left and use the MIDI keyboard instead of the computer’s, and see what happened. A couple of hours later I had played some new parts that fit well. One thing I learned from David Borden was that it’s usually more important that each part be true to itself than slavishly follow another.
Was writing the reclock code a waste of time? No, it’s still really helpful, and sometimes necessary, when navigating through a piece like this, to know where the downbeats are.
References:
Repetition (23 December 2003)
Logic's Beat Mapping ( 6 January 2005)
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