natural drum mpc swing on fruity loops

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lilawreebeats

New member
wuzup fp, I'm using fl studio 9 with a juno-g as my midi controller to play my drums. Latency is definitely an issue but it's not that bad becuase i just clean my dums up on the piano roll. I'm gettin into groove templates to make my tracks sound "not so robotic'' and was wondering...if I do my drum patterns on the piano roll locked in, how do i get that natural mpc swing? Not the hip hop east coast swing, but that loose southern hihat feel, like I played it on beat, but it sounds like it has slight errors. hope I'm not confusing yall...I'm trying to get that natural mpc sound. I produce my tracks double-time (example 150) that's my fav. tempo to get artist buckin...any tips on what note to quantize on? by the way I love east coast music no disrespect fp
 
It's not about quantization but rather about how stuff is not on the beat.

It's sometimes called humanisation.

From the early days (1985-6) this feature has allowed notes to be randomly placed around the beat within a set number of ticks, say +/- 10 ticks. If you want the notes to sound lazy and more behind the beat than in front then you could set the ticks up so that it were more like +15/-6, i.e. up to 15 ticks after the beat but only up to 5 ticks in front of the beat. In the early days you had to do this by applying the +/1 10 and then adding 5 to every note position. These days you can set a positive and negative range independently.

In FL, you will need to check whether you can randomly move the individual tracks around the quantization grid in this manner or not.
 
lilawreebeats said:
i understand humanization, but you lost me after that, what do u mean by "ticks"?
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ticks or ppq. How the quarter note beat is sub-divided.

i.e. most sequencers use 480ppq, some you can set to any value, reason is set at 960ppq, Cubase can be set at 15360 ppq in some setups or at 1536 in others. I've also seen 720ppq. The smallest has been 24ppq (the recommended minimum in the MIDI file standard). C-Lab's Logic (yes I have been using this stuff for quite some time: since 1986) and Pro24 on the Atari both used 384 ppq. My original humanisation ideas and parameters were developed in these two programs.

At 480ppq the numbers I mentioned +/-10 / +15/-5 work well in providing that random scatter necessary to humanise a beat.

Musicians have three phrases that describe their concept of playing in time, for the most part self-explanatory:
  1. ahead of the beat
  2. on the beat
  3. behind the beat

When trying to reproduce this kind of interpretation of time or feel, you need to adjust your humanisation parameters to reflect your concept of time.

Swing is then achieved by looking at how much shuffle - i.e. playing the second note in a 8th note pair behind the half-beat - you want.

Traditional swing theory says it is achieved by interpreting the 8th note pair as a 4tr-8th triplet.

Later swing theory says it is somewhere between the two (the off-beat and the late 8th triplet) and may even shift within the range of them, particularly when syncopation and anticipation come into play.

As with everything, swing is a feel, not a formula. However you choose to implement your swing you need to add some human looseness to that implementation.
 
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If I were you, I would be using the sequencer on the Juno G, not FL.

You got a $1000 workstation, why are even using a $99 DAW for sequencing?

There's nothing wrong with using FL if its all you got, but if you got a workstation use it, IMO.

The Roland Fantom sequencers, which I think is what the Juno G is based on, has a pretty good swing function built in that you can use. Not as good as an mpc, but better than FL, IMO.

If you want that "loose" feel, you really need to play your high hats live, no quantize. You can quantize your kicks and snares, but the less you quantize the more realistic its going to sound.

Basically all "swing" does is move every other note foward or back by a set amount. So you can manually make your own swing just by highlighting every other HH and moving them back a little bit. It creates that tension and false starts that your talking about. Thats probably your best bet until you learn to play live. Good luck.
 
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k81 said:
If I were you, I would be using the sequencer on the Juno G, not FL.

You got a $1000 workstation, why are even using a $99 DAW for sequencing?

There's nothing wrong with using FL if its all you got, but if you got a workstation use it, IMO.

The Roland Fantom sequencers, which I think is what the Juno G is based on, has a pretty good swing function built in that you can use. Not as good as an mpc, but better than FL, IMO.

If you want that "loose" feel, you really need to play your high hats live, no quantize. You can quantize your kicks and snares, but the less you quantize the more realistic its going to sound.

Basically all "swing" does is move every other note foward or back by a set amount. So you can manually make your own swing just by highlighting every other HH and moving them back a little bit. It creates that tension and false starts that your talking about. Thats probably your best bet until you learn to play live. Good luck.
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i feel you bruh, but the truth is I have better orchestra instruments on my fl studio like miroslav, I have my own custom patches that sound better than the ones on the juno. I'm still trying to understand midi transfers and things like that. I usually just use my midi to control instruments. Is there a way i could record a live hihat sequence with swing on my juno, and transfer the midi data to my fl studio? Hope I'm not confusing you

---------- Post added at 09:32 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:15 AM ----------

and actually the sequencer on the juno isnt all the good...especially when you have to actually compose a whole song. fl studio is great because you can go more in detail
 
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