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synced delays out of sync?
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Fayette



Joined: Mar 14, 2014
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PostPosted: Fri Mar 14, 2014 5:30 am    Post subject: synced delays out of sync?
Subject description: whats up with that?
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hi there. first of all, I'd like to say a big thank you to all the contributors to this place. I love this forum!!!! so much inspiration and knowledge being shared here, its amazing Very Happy THANK YOU!!!

ok then, I have a question...

at the moment i'm using my g2 in a live setup. no computers, only hardware.
i'm sequencing it from my machinedrum, and that, for the most part works flawless.... except for the synced delays! when I try to use the sync function, its as if the delays are always kinda off, just a tiny bit, but enough to sound off, and I cant figure out why. its not THAT big a problem since I can just use the time function, but, I dunno, I'd like the sync function to work.

any ideas what the problem could be??

i'm pretty new with the G2, so if this is a noobish and silly question I apologize

thanks in advance for anyone taking time to read this and maybe answer me Smile

all the best,
Emil

Last edited by Fayette on Tue Nov 29, 2016 2:00 pm; edited 3 times in total
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blue hell
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PostPosted: Fri Mar 14, 2014 6:27 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Sorry Emil, never used synced delays, but wanted to say welcome anyway.
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also .. could someone please turn down the thermostat a bit.
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Fayette



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PostPosted: Fri Mar 14, 2014 8:33 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

thank you, been reading here for a while, thought it was time to register!
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Electromagnetic Wave



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PostPosted: Sat Mar 15, 2014 12:34 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Hey Welcome !

Just to be sure ... Do you use the Master Clock signal ?

Does your sound goes through several slots ? Do you use many slots (DPS) / BUS ? I think you have a delay between each slot.


Quote:
The 4 busses are not sample-accurate, but have a delay of 24 samples.

http://electro-music.com/forum/post-389554.html#389554

There are other topic about this problem.

or

Clocksynced delays drifting out of sync!
http://electro-music.com/forum/topic-6899.html
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Tim Kleinert



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PostPosted: Sat Mar 15, 2014 1:20 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

If you pass around MIDI clock, make sure to use the shortest MIDI cables possible.

I know this sounds weird, but it's true.

I did quite a few live ambient shows with two G2Xs, one acting as a MIDI clock master and the other as the slave. When using a longer MIDI cable (3m), I would sometimes experience clock drift (the BPM display on the slaved unit would sway approx. +/- 2 BPMs and synced delays could get glitch-y and out of sync). When exchanging the long cable for a short one (50 cm), the phenomenon vanished.

Perhaps this has to do with MIDI cables being unshielded and unsymmetrical -I wouldn't know. (A former student of mine has had good experience with using wireless MIDI systems for passing around MIDI clock on stage.)
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Fayette



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PostPosted: Mon Mar 17, 2014 5:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

thanks for the answers Smile

electromagnetic wave: I'm sending out a masterclock from the machinedrum if thats what you mean? I use all four slots at the same time, but there's no interaction between the slots so far. thanks for linking to the other topics, interesting reading!

tim: interesting, did not know that long midi cables could do that, I'm using 3 meter midi cables, i'm gonna get some shorter cables and see if that helps.
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drapdap



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PostPosted: Mon Mar 17, 2014 12:42 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Tim Kleinert wrote:
If you pass around MIDI clock, make sure to use the shortest MIDI cables possible.

I know this sounds weird, but it's true.


Tim, you write strange things again, that does sound wierd. Very Happy
i was just hopelessly trying to sync my engine and a dsi tetr4 to my drummachines masterclock for tha past weeks, but they float away after a few minutes, not always, but hopeless, despite it worked for years...

i am using new longer (around 2m, diy, shielded) midicables not giving into the length myth. put them there, because there new. Very Happy now i go home and try the sortest cables, like it was, when it worked, but you are right, i know. Very Happy

thanks
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Tim Kleinert



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PostPosted: Mon Mar 17, 2014 4:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

drapdap wrote:
Tim, you write strange things again

Again? Do I do that regularly? Laughing

Quote:
but you are right, i know. Very Happy

I don't claim authority on this, it was just my repeated observation. The BPM display on the slaved G2X consistently displayed subtle deviations with a 3m cable, and none with a 50cm one.

Maybe it's the fault of my cables, but I didn't pursue the issue as I had found a solution and had to get ready for the gig.
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Electromagnetic Wave



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PostPosted: Tue Mar 18, 2014 1:37 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

No, the source from the Clock Generator module on your G2 patch. Do you use the Master Clock signal ? Just to be sure Smile

Quote:
If you pass around MIDI clock, make sure to use the shortest MIDI cables possible.

I know this sounds weird, but it's true.

This is not the opinion of all. But I confirm what Tim said.

Quote:
The impedance of the MIDI cable is almost of no consequence, and so the delay is also of little value (<100ns over 100 meters I would expect to be typical). Since MIDI is limited to 50 ft, I wouldn't say it's a problem.

http://electro-music.com/forum/post-265263.html#265263


I had problems with external sync in the past. More about software vs harware ... but I noticed the same thing with the shortest MIDI cables
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t4k4sh1



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PostPosted: Wed Mar 19, 2014 4:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Emil,

I do experience the problem all the time. It had been always around. No matter how clean the MIDI clock is, the delay drifts in time and also gets noisy after few minutes. Even the cleanest MIDI clock from SND's ACME-4 does the same. Don't waste time looking for clean MIDI clock/cable.
FWIU MIDI is just 31250bps and MIDI clock is stream of 48 0xF8 (8bit signal) per quarter note. If you sync a delay line to the incoming clock, there will always be jitter by nature even if there are nothing else being sent. You can't simply divide 31250 with 48 x tempo, each cycle of any musical length will not be even at all, they will just be musically correct over some period of time. The delay line locks to the jittery clock, making each cycle of the feedback be altered, then you get glitch noise and drifts. They should have designed the delay to smoothe incoming clock but they didn't. You can't do anything with it.

If it is possible, use G2 as a master device to drive slaves. This way the drift won't happen (at least to the extent of the slaved situation), that's the only solution.

gl,

Takashi Watanabe
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Tim Kleinert



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PostPosted: Wed Mar 19, 2014 5:07 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

If the goal is to use delays as synced audio-buffers (mini-loopers) that play along accurately to an external MIDI clock for a longer time, that can be done perfectly, but feedbacking delays in "Clk" mode isn't the way to do it.

Otherwise, Takashi described it perfectly. It's not a design flaw, it's an inherent flaw of MIDI. Synchronizing sample-accurate audio processes @96kHz to a clock signal transmitted at a far lower rate is asking for trouble. Laughing


Some implementations smooth the conversion from MIDI clock to delay length, some don't. In either case, the result isn't ideal. The unsmoothed solution results in crackles/clicks, the smoothed one in pitch warbles. Choose your poison. Twisted Evil
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Fayette



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PostPosted: Wed Mar 19, 2014 8:53 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

electromagnetic wave: I've tried both using the clockgenerator module, but i've also tried just sending the g2 midi from the machinedrum. the more I think about it, the more I think that using the machinedrum as mastersequencer might not be the best idea. I think I'll try to switch it around and sequence from the g2 instead. I'm new to using my equipment as live as i'm trying to right now. its a lot of fun but there's also a lot of new things I gotta think about when setting this up.

THANK YOU for all the answers, I got way more and better answers than I dared hope for! awesome Very Happy the more time I spend here the more I appreciate it, fora's (spelling?) as good as this is, in my experience, pretty rare nowadays.
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t4k4sh1



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PostPosted: Wed Mar 19, 2014 10:18 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Tim Kleinert wrote:
If the goal is to use delays as synced audio-buffers (mini-loopers) that play along accurately to an external MIDI clock for a longer time, that can be done perfectly, but feedbacking delays in "Clk" mode isn't the way to do it.


Tim, thanks for chiming in, just checked your looper patch. I didn't know this one. Thanks.

BTW OT, Have you ever tried to create a MIDI looper that stores note and potion informations to note sequencer modules? My goal was to use the sequencer modules to store note and time stamp separately just like conventional MIDI sequencers store song position and note number to memory.
If you use note sequencers as memory in similar way then it will be possible to save recorded sequence with variation/patch. So that your play will not get vanished by selecting different variation.
I tried to do it several times but never really succeeded. There always was timing problems. But by looking at your audio looper patch, I thought you should be able to do it much elegantly.

Cheers,

Takashi
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blue hell
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 19, 2014 11:08 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

It looks like recording with the sequencers set open a time window, and the last note seen in that window wins ... I've always found it a bit messy as well to make anything but a pseudo random generator with it, which was OK though for my purpose Laughing

Then again .. if it works that way it should be possible to actually record a time value, by using a synced saw wave LFO ...

Then for the note value probably use a S&H that you trigger a little while after the record signal for the sequencer comes in.

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also .. could someone please turn down the thermostat a bit.
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Tim Kleinert



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PostPosted: Wed Mar 19, 2014 4:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

t4k4sh1 wrote:
Tim, thanks for chiming in, just checked your looper patch. I didn't know this one. Thanks.

You're welcome. I have to admit though that those looper patches are old and in dire need of a major overhaul, as I've meanwhile come up with much better granular time-stretch algorithms.

t4k4sh1 wrote:
BTW OT, Have you ever tried to create a MIDI looper that stores note and potion informations to note sequencer modules?

Yes, I did in fact do some thinking and work on that subject, as I always wanted to be able to record and play back polyphonic MIDI note information. I started out, as you suggested, with note sequencers, but that approach becomes DSP-expensive very quickly if you want enough note memory and polyphony. So I ultimately dropped it in favor of using short delay lines as note memory, which -in the way I implemented it- is quite DSP-efficient. It however suffers from the timing resolution being quantized to the delay length (25ms, equaling 40 updates per second), and of course your performance cannot be saved to memory.

Here's the basic implementation:
http://www.electro-music.com/forum/topic-42243.html

I then went on to use this approach for further ideas. Here's a patch that can record up to 60 seconds of vocoded audio and keyboard performance of the carrier oscillators, and play that back at flexible speed.
http://www.electro-music.com/forum/topic-42287.html


I always wanted to expand this technique with MIDI-clock-synchronized looping, quantization, MIDI CC# recording (for capturing live automation) etc., all of which is perfectly possible -but I just never came around to doing it. Embarassed Laughing

Another idea I had was encoding the note on/off information of the keyboard into the 24 bits of the G2 numerical system, and store that into note sequencers. In this way, two note sequencers could already cover a keyboard range of 48 notes polyphonically, albeit without velocity information.

I have to add that the record mode of the note sequencers has some weird quirks/bugs when being clocked fast (which you have to do when using them as memory storage). It's been a while and I don't remember exactly what it was -only that it was driving me totally nuts. Twisted Evil

cheers,
t
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Electromagnetic Wave



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PostPosted: Thu Mar 20, 2014 2:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Or sync the g2 with audio pulse instead of using MIDI ?
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jamos



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PostPosted: Sat Mar 22, 2014 6:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Just came across this, have not yet read all the replies, but I wanted to relate a similar problem and solution I ran across.

I had an arrangement with 2 G2s, one clocking the other - I cannot remember if the problem occurred in the master or slave, but - I discovered that sometimes the synced delays were out of sync initially, until I changed the tempo; then they would sync up fine. At the time I figured it had to do with some sort of calculation that did not happen until a new tempo occurred.. I'm sorry, I don't remember details, but that might be worth trying out
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dasz



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PostPosted: Wed Jun 11, 2014 12:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

jamos wrote:
Just came across this, have not yet read all the replies, but I wanted to relate a similar problem and solution I ran across.

I had an arrangement with 2 G2s, one clocking the other - I cannot remember if the problem occurred in the master or slave, but - I discovered that sometimes the synced delays were out of sync initially, until I changed the tempo; then they would sync up fine. At the time I figured it had to do with some sort of calculation that did not happen until a new tempo occurred.. I'm sorry, I don't remember details, but that might be worth trying out


+1. This happens around here all the time, and that's what I do to fix the problem. Sometimes switching the delays between clock sync and ms and back again works too (I think).
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3phase



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PostPosted: Mon Jul 14, 2014 4:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Tim Kleinert wrote:
If you pass around MIDI clock, make sure to use the shortest MIDI cables possible.

I know this sounds weird, but it's true.

I did quite a few live ambient shows with two G2Xs, one acting as a MIDI clock master and the other as the slave. When using a longer MIDI cable (3m), I would sometimes experience clock drift (the BPM display on the slaved unit would sway approx. +/- 2 BPMs and synced delays could get glitch-y and out of sync). When exchanging the long cable for a short one (50 cm), the phenomenon vanished.

Perhaps this has to do with MIDI cables being unshielded and unsymmetrical -I wouldn't know. (A former student of mine has had good experience with using wireless MIDI systems for passing around MIDI clock on stage.)


length is just as much anissue as with any Rs232 serial conection.. they dont, go endless long wirhout repeaters but a few meters should be ok with correct serial data transmission cable..and thats the problem with cheap chinese midicables..they are often not even good for the audio bandwidth. i use aes cable for self build midi cables with good results.. i run my studio clocking from a thru box that acts as repeater and that casio thru box does 5 meter clock cables easy..
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3phase



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PostPosted: Mon Jul 14, 2014 4:32 pm    Post subject: Re: synced delays out of sync?
Subject description: whats up with that?
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Fayette wrote:
hi there. first of all, I'd like to say a big thank you to all the contributors to this place. I love this forum!!!! so much inspiration and knowledge being shared here, its amazing Very Happy THANK YOU!!!

ok then, now that im done nuthuggin all you guys I have a question...

at the moment i'm using my g2 in a live setup. no computers, only hardware.
i'm sequencing it from my machinedrum, and that, for the most part works flawless.... except for the synced delays! when I try to use the sync function, its as if the delays are always kinda off, just a tiny bit, but enough to sound off, and I cant figure out why. its not THAT big a problem since I can just use the time function, but, I dunno, I'd like the sync function to work.

any ideas what the problem could be??

i'm pretty new with the G2, so if this is a noobish and silly question I apologize

thanks in advance for anyone taking time to read this and maybe answer me Smile

all the best,
Emil


you can try offset delays befor the actual clocked delay modules but in general the machinedrum is a shit master clock..elektron should have included offset delays..but they havent.. So get another machine as master..than booth g2 and machinedrum are later and fit better together..

in any case offset delays belong in sequenced G2 patches.. wether thats ofsset delays with the logic delay for patch internal clock distribution or for clocked audio delays that can be early too... if they are too late already. further offset delays wont help of cause..than you need to delay anything else to make it fit..

people often mistake wrong offset delays as drift...usually there is no drift ..just no groove.. When its not together it wont groove even when the tempo is the same..
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