Fixing The Groove And Adding A Beat

One of the challenges of doing this using Live Loops in Logic Pro to resequence lines of dialogue from The Message is that the relationship between the start of each vocal line and the beat varies frequently. This is reflected in the vocals starting a different number of 32^nd notes before the main beat in many lines, with some verses tending to start earlier than in others:

This makes splicing up the vocals to put in Live Loops challenging, because each loop needs to be exactly a bar long, and the place in the bar that separates lines of dialogue is different for different verses, so there’s no single place to cut that works for all of them. Also, if each dialogue cell is not exactly a bar long, the cell gets out of sync with the main Live Loop timing, leading to artefacts when changing between lines of dialogue and drift if the same cell is left playing.

The solution was to reedit all my lines of dialogue to cut them at the same place in the bar for each verse, with possibly a slightly longer cell only at the end of the verse leading into the chorus. I then dragged all the newly cut chunks of dialogue back into the Live Loop grid.

This also created a challenge when I added a Roland TR-808 drum machine software instrument and tried to create a new beat that works with the vocals. A beat that worked for one verse was totally out of time on another. To deal with this I kept the beat simple and shifted it forwards or backwards according to the vocal starting point in that verse, then duplicated it in every cell for that verse. This way I can hit the button at the bottom of the column to play the combined vocals and beat and switch between bars randomly without the beat getting out of time; albeit with something of a rhythmic glitch when I change verses.

Here’s what the result looks like with the funky new drum pattern:

My original intention was to just use the dialogue from the last verse, and that does avoid the rhythmic glitches but I like various bits of dialogue from other verses too; so for now I’ll keep all the dialogue available and decide what to use later.

We were required to use software processes to generate content or structure for this assignment, so in tribute to John Cage’s Music of Changes I came up with this perl script to generate random numbers from 1 to 74 for choosing the order to trigger the columns of Live Loops:

perl -e 'for ($i=0;$i<10;$i++) {print $i+1,":",int(rand(74))+1, "\n";}'

Here’s an example output:

1:42
2:50
3:67
4:11
5:11
6:6
7:2
8:21
9:25
10:39

And here’s what that sounds like, with the new beat: