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Time warp ::
I have this one song based on a free piano improv over a droney loop. Later I found a constant tempo that fit the phrases pretty well, and recorded (scratch) rhythm tracks at that tempo.
There’s a delicate balance; the piano part is alternately floating over the groove in its own quirky rhythmic world—and landing squarely on downbeats. It’s also inextricably mixed with the droney loop, and there are a couple of places where the recording is briefly clipped (though I’d mostly patched that up). I got it in my head that the part would have to be replaced, so I set out to transcribe it.
It wasn’t too hard to make a MIDI recording of the part, one phrase at a time, while watching the audio waveform as a rhythmic guide. One fast passage required a trip to AU Lab, where I used AUTimePitch to listen at half speed. My hands had found those patterns before, and they found them again. I came out of that with a piano score full of phrases like this:
But whether I threw away the original score and tried to play something new, or tried to play it note for note, something was missing. So much of the feel came from that original performance.
Tonight I finally undertook to learn how to use Live’s Warp feature. I imported two audio files, the piano improv and the rhythm track, and started dragging Warp Markers around:
It feels like the worst form of cheating, but in this case it might rescue an unreproducible performance from a few rough edges.
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