[sdiy] Envelope attack smoothing for drum question

[Mattias Rickardsson]

On Sat, 22 Aug 2020 at 05:10, Brian Willoughby <brianw at audiobanshee.com>
wrote:

> 9 milliseconds would be an order of magnitude worse than a good drummer.
>
> According to an article by Michael Stewart, from the October 1987 issue of
> Electronic Musician magazine, even a few milliseconds is enough to change
> the feel of a drum track.
>
> At 130 bpm, playing as little as 7 milliseconds ahead gives the music a
> bit of "snap."
>
> Playing 5 milliseconds behind the beat gives a "groove" feel, and 10
> milliseconds is "in the pocket."
>
> Synth bass is only about 2 or 3 ms behind.
>
> Granted, not every live drummer is good enough to play in the groove or in
> the pocket, but those that can are consistently five milliseconds behind or
> ten milliseconds behind, respectively, as is required by the song they're
> playing.
> [...]
> That said, larger delays are also common. Around 35 ms ahead of the beat
> makes a drummer sound nervous. 22 ms ahead and they have drive. 23 ms
> behind, and they're perceived as dragging. A drummer who's more than 40
> milliseconds early or more than 34 ms behind is going to need to get a day
> job, or at least some more sleep. [...]
>

Thanks for the interesting article reference. This should be an important
field of research, but it's rarely heard of.
Can't help starting to wonder... if the drum track timing is off, what is
the timing reference here? Do we often have lots of other snappy
instruments with lots of notes coming more often than drum track events, so
that the drummer isn't at all perceived as the timing reference of the
song? It's hard to believe that we could tweak the drum track timing back
and forth without changing the perceived pulse positions of
the music, isn't it?
Or maybe it's just me missing something, listening to drummachine music all
day. :-]

Or does the article refer to the timing of single drum hits, with the rest
of the drum track being the reference? That's also an important timing
measure. Hmm.

On Sat, 22 Aug 2020 at 05:16, Brian Willoughby <brianw at audiobanshee.com>
wrote:

>
> On Aug 21, 2020, at 1:38 PM, Jason Nanna <jasonnanna at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Would delaying the trigger until an oscillator zero-crossing be a
> simpler way to synchronize?  Assuming a bipolar triangle, I don't think it
> matters whether it's rising or falling.
>
> There are people who can hear when the polarity of a kick drum is
> reversed. In general, it's accepted that polarity is not perceptible, but
> that's probably only for steady tones. The attack transient of a kick drum
> - or any drum - seems to be important. It could be that it's very important
> that the sound wave start with compressed (positive) excursion. But this is
> anecdotal - I can't find a reference.
>

Yes, the direction of the drum wave would be important. So the
waiting-for-zero-crossing 55 Hz bass drum would have a jitter of 18 ms, not
9.

Funky. ;-)

/mr
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