I actually switch a lot. I come from bands where we just play any tempo we want for each song, maybe change a couple times in a song…
I might be wrong here, and I’m not talking about you just in general, but it seems like Electronic music genres stuck to the same tempo for the days of records and beat matching, I found it curious that after ableton and other digital platforms hit the scene, that many artists still stuck in a similar tempo for their stuff.
Is ‘caffeinated beverages’ codename for something else 
I have been known to have ‘caffeinated beverages’ and dance for days 
I’m pretty a natural these days…
Love me some coffee, Yerba mate, and lately have been hittin a little kratom which is a relative of coffee but much more potent, just occasionally though…
Never did the big C really, actually played in a band were all of them started taking the earnings and partying they’re asses off. I was the last person in an 8 member band to find out that we were making 1,000 to $2,000 a show, they’d hand me a 20 spot for gas and said we were getting paid round $400 and still paying off the drummers dad for the album we recorded… I’d leave after the show and they’d “blow” all the money that night…
After a few months of that when I found out I left the band I had played with for 6 years and moved out west, had to get away or I would’ve went down with them…
There were some other more sacred things that really “opened” me up, usually till past the dawn. That was years ago though… Once you open up enough you just stay open… 
I’ve certainly pulled more all nighters than most, I know that…
Yes for some reason I can picture you Mike at the big festivals, levitating in your teepee, high as a kite on chai latte, herbal tea and life in general
Once I stayed up for three days at Earthdance and by the end I had created my own language. It was mix of several languages that I didn’t really know, mixed with a slight hint of English, and lots of goofy syllables… I would only speak this language to everyone I saw, and I’d tell them were the hot music was at, they all understood and pretty soon soon I had dozens of people speaking this new language, and they all arrived for the dancybop…
Let’s just say if you wanted to count my dew drops, you’d be staring at a field of lilies…
“Dancybop en domenstein, groovealong”
Awesome.
And to keep on topic, sounds like a great frame of mind to tune those hi hats
Oh yeah, I thought we were talking about tuning your hat while your high, sorry off topic…
i just watched the Fleetwood Mac “Tusk” video, and my current 118 bpm chill groove tune-in-production is, i must say, sounding overly demure in comparison. In fact does not bear comparison whatsoever lol. Totally different styles.
But anyway, whatever the bpm of Tusk, all i have to say is: Whoa! Energy central! Incredible flourishing of powerful creativity, verve, styles and innovation - a true calibration of celebration. Robustly emotional and somehow ephemeral.
but to bring the topic back on the rails, is there any cool technique of using a Thru machine on the Octatrack to apply realtime effects to a Hi-Hat signal coming from a Machinedrum?
possible Compressor-Flanger combinations perhaps … to then record not the initial signal but the Thru machine’s effected version?
I like to just tune hats by ear till they sound about right. As someone else said, dont stray too far from the original pitch with samples. Then maybe I´ll use and LFO or by hand vary the pitch a little over a pattern. Cents not semi-tones :) And throw on the same technique for decay and the hats starts sounding a bit more natural. I dont really see any point in searching out the fundamental frequency for hats and cymbals, unless you`re gonna use them in some sort of funny melodic way.
I tune my kicks precisely to a fundamental frequency, but hats I find aren’t so critical, therefore just tune them till they sound right in the mix.
I find the hats envelopes the most important factor, and require the most critical tweaking per track.
How many times have you heard an 808 or 909 toms and kicks banging away completely out of tune with the rest of the track. Sounds terrible.
I think a lot of people don’t realise it’s necessary to tune drums at all, particularly in electronic music
two types of escapism perhaps - completely ignoring the element of tuning as regards percussion instruments, or totally getting way too distracted by the topic of tuning.
certainly yields rewards when the area is explored.
sometimes, out of tune percussion elements do in fact work, although it really is a stylistic mechanism, tricky to encapsulate the subtleties of how or why that might be working.
Yes good point.
In a more abstract experimental arrangement, tuning may not be so critical and can even act as another artistic element to the mix.
For example I could imagine in certain Bjork tracks, this approach could work well, as that chick is friggin out there artistically 
the hihats were particularly nice on the Debut record, due in some part to the collab with 808 State’s Massey and also Nellee Hooper who seemed to have quite a finesse about his style and way of hearing things.
As a drummer (I mean acoustic drummer), I am aware that drums and cymbals are “percussions without a definite pitch”. That said, acoustic drums can be pitched by ears but cymbals can’t.
I work a bit differently with electronic sounds. The main aim of pitching hi hats when I program on the AR or MD is avoiding masking effects (mainly with snares and other sounds) and make them sound good, which is the most important thing. Don’t know if it helps…
When talking 808 or 909 bass drums it can depend on the settings, for example a long decay 808 bd pitch goes down in the decay phase, where as the 909 has pitch envelope at start and it is only when the decay is set longer that it settles in pitch.
after purchasing a Jomox mBase11 6 months ago, i am now getting around to integrating and exploring the instrument in a practical fashion.
where a sound starts and where a sound stops has a huge influence on the perception of the pitch, when it comes to bass drums with an LFO of some sort or other on the pitch envelope.
and then, after sequencing and sampling a bass drum pattern to the Octatrack, to then further refine, perhaps resample, retune … possibly isolate a single bass drum sound from the 4 bar sample, and then re-sequence that sound using the Octatrack … well, it is a variable option scenario, both subtle and overt at the same time, strangely.
I love the noise generator for hi hats sounds so good
