Just curious if people record using measures or time

[cactus-head]

Hello,

I was just curious, do people record in Mixcraft using Beats and Measures or do you use time? Because I studied music when I was younger, I gravitate towards lining everything up in measures. But, back in the day when we used the recording studio at university, or even at home using 4 track tape recorders, or even in the local recording studios when the medium was tape everything was based on time and the position of the clock - not measures.

The thing about tape, if you used a click track, tempos were more or less pretty steady. However, there was always a little stretchiness in the tape, the phsycial amount of tape that passes over the head as one reel unwinds and the other winds, or little fluctuations in the speed of the machines that might change the timing a little bit over the course of the recording. And engineers would take a razor blade and cut a chunk out here, put that chunk in over there, or just throw it out.

Nowadays we can really be precise with our professional and home studios. Do you think recordings made today are more mechanical and robotic because of the precision that can be maintained with computers? Or maybe not - maybe we have the tools to explore deeper musicality with the amount of control we have. I'm just curious what people think and if they use the clock or use measures to record. I'm starting to think that using measures for digital recording is too accurate and takes a little out of the natural flow of music.

[jwarv]

Spiritual spam?

[freightgod]

Donovan is that you?

[cactus-head]

Donovan is that you?

Hurdy Gurdy Man?

It was just something on my mind in terms of approach to recording music. Right now some friends and I have these "Challenges" where we have to record a song or a piece of music in a certain time frame based on certain parameters. Each person shares with the others their creation. Some focus on clarity and production, some focus on just getting something done and submitting it, some put down every idea they have on a thousand tracks and then widdle away until they have a complete project. And we all use combinations of any of the above but have certain tendancies with our approaches. It might seem like using time vs measures really makes no difference - but I see each as different types of precision. Measures are laid out and stem from written music so it can be very formulaic. Time on the other hand seems more fluid to me.

[mixyguy2]

Time, always. I'm a free form kinda guy.

[rrodg84]

i record in measures but switch back and forth to see the time. i get the "mechanical feel" that you're talking about. this is great for electronic type stuff (i do alot of chiptune and other game music) but my punk rock stuff sounds robotic when the timing is perfect. so then i have to go back and screw it up on purpose

[cactus-head]

Thanks for the responses. One thing I discovered in all this was though I can't set Mixcrafts BPM below 40 by hand, I was able to load a midi file as a project with a BPM lower than that, 20 for example, that changed the project tempo. However this can only be a starting point as adding the midi file as a track(s) later and not as a project doesn't change the BPM. If you change the project BPM after that you won't be able to change it back to below 40. To solve that, after you load your MIDI file add a marker, click the tempo button so that it fills with the lower than 40 BPM and you can then use that marker anywhere by adjusting it's position.