[Psy and Goa trance with non-4/4 time signatures]

 

What do you mean, that swing patterns weren't possible in the 90's? Swing is the most famous on the TR-909 and 808, and they're machines from the 80's! And tons of hardware sequencers can do that as well. I don't know how it's done in Hallucinogen tracks, but it can be done in various ways (hardware sequencer, sequencer of a drumcomputer/synth, midi, fading in/out of tracks with different rhythms, combinations, ...). Would like to know his trick too, since it's a pretty smooth transition.

 

Well I don't know if it was possible, I just thought that automating swing would be a newer technological thing. I mean I know drum machines have swing, but is it an adjustable thing? Like could you automate it somehow on a drum machine? Even if it's by hand maybe? It just seems complex to have pretty much every channel in the song shifting swing at the same time. Maybe he just did a lot of work that was a serious pain in the ass to achieve it. He's definitely no under-achiever. I'll put whatever work in that I need to in order to make this happen, but I'm having a rough time getting it right. The closest I've gotten so far is moving the MIDI notes by hand, which is still a little messy. Maybe he just did it by hand and had a ton of patience? Or maybe there's a mathematical way to do it. Maybe if I was super analytical about it I could divide my grid up in the right way. I'm not sure. A real brain bender, this one!

[Psy and Goa trance with non-4/4 time signatures]

12/8 as a time signature is just a way to write 4/4 with 16th note triplets without putting the term "triplet" into the notation. When I was in music school one of my instructors liked to say that 12/8 was basically the "musical snobs way to notate 4/4 16th note triplets". There are numerous alternative ways to notation just about anything time signature-wise, but I was taught that it makes more sense to go with the simplest and clearest version. I will guarantee that 99 out of a 100 dance music artists writing pieces like this in their software are using 4/4 with triplet quantization and not 12/8.

 

For my tracks not in 4/4 (that I can remember off hand)

 

The Long Walk Home:

Something New 5/4

Stepping Forward 7/4

 

Flights of Infinity:

Symplicity 15:07 - 19:16 section is in 5/4

The End of the End is in a cycle of 3 measures of 6/4 and one measure of 8/4

 

 

The Beginning is at the End:

Self Destructing Mechanism is in 5/4 until 7:49, after which it is in 4/4

 

As mentioned already, Ubar Tmar makes a lot of use of non-standard time signatures. Simon Posford does on occasion as well, although more so in Shpongle than his other projects ("...And the Day Turned to Night", among others, is in 7), in addition to his slick shifts between straight sixteen notes and triplet 16th notes and vis-versa in 4/4 time signatures.

 

Hey everyone, sorry to dig up a semi-old thread but I found this thread on Google and have been searching for some clarity on how to achieve this Posford "morphing" thing.

 

I tried crossfading between two clips, but that was really messy and sounded pretty awful, and then I tried rearranging MIDI notes by hand but it's also messy and not precise. Does anybody know how that Posford morphing thing is achieved?

 

Specifically I am thinking in Fluoro Neuro Sponge from about 1:00 to 1:35ish.

 

Someone on another site suggested that maybe it was swing automation, but given that a lot of Hallucinogen stuff is from the mid 90's it seems doubtful that it's what Simon did. It DOES work in Ableton though, except you can't automate it, so you can't actually get it in a song which is really frustrating. If I set my groove pool to 8T and set all settings to 0% except Quantize, which is at 100%, then I get the correct triplet groove. As I move the Quantize parameter from 100-0% the sound occurs, which is generally pretty correct, though I think Simon actually changes the MIDI pattern a bit too. However, in Ableton you can only automate the Global Groove parameter which seems to do absolutely nothing sound-wise when I move it up and down.

 

Does anybody know how to achieve this morphing effect then? There must be a workaround or something in Ableton, or maybe another method besides automating groove?

 

Thanks everyone!