Say it with me: manipulating midi data is brutal. It's that short and simple. It's actually beyond awful. I think I'd prefer to record 25 individual guitar tracks rather than have to do hard manipulation on one midi file, and then imagine if you have to manipulate multiple files? Brutal, I tell ya.
It was one of those very weekends for me with clocking in around 13 hours on midi manipulation data. EZDrummer is a great product with great sounds, and if what you're looking for is there right in front of you in the GUI, you're golden...and EZDrummer is your hero. If the pattern you're looking for is NOT in the GUI, however, prepare to want to slit your wrists. Sometimes I actually think creating drumbeats the old way, on literal outboard gear and tappin' away on the keys, was a bit easier. Sigh. There simply must be a better way of doing this that I'm not aware of.
I thought it would be simple, thinking I'd just use EZDrummer's "Song Creator" function and the software would suggest all the appropriate parts that would go with my song, etc. Yeah, well, no go... 50% of them didn't even sound like they were in the same time signature, with at least half of those sounding like something from another planet. The other half I carefully tried placing into my track and, while some of it fit, way too much of it didn't, and the true pain of manipulating midi files is figuring out the WHAT and the WHERE of those issues, and so I tried yet a different approach. Needless to say, I did quite a bit of swearing at EZDrummer and Pro Tools MIDI.
If the work I did sticks, I'll actually feel good about, pain included. If it doesn't stick, though, I may start to sob hysterically. Seriously, though, had I worked on this ten years ago, I would have been stuck on it for probably 2-3 years, trying desperately to solve an almost invisible problem. I'm proud of myself to say that I located the issues pretty quickly and spent more time trying to solve it versus find it so progress has definitely been made on my behalf.
The funny thing about issues like I'm experiencing is how your ear deals with it. It's probably impossible to explain to someone who has never done this sort of thing before but your ear basically has a zoom in it, not unlike how your eye can zoom in on small text, and then when you listen to something with your "zoom" turned on you're completely focused on that very small element. The crazy part is trying to un-zoom your ear; it just doesn't work that way, and it normally involves walking away for a few hours and returning, or in my case I'll be giving my track multiple listens multiple days over multiple systems, just to make sure that I accomplished what I set out to do. The ear is a funny organ, I tell you, and there seems to be a hidden and strange psychology within it that's almost beyond words. It can be your best friend and also your worst enemy. For example, I didn't even fully acknowledge some of the issues with the track I was working on for many months since my ears were playing games with me. I wish I could describe it better but you'll have to take my word for it.
In other news, I actually now have a rough working front cover for the CD, and it's finally official...I'm going with "jazz machine" since I couldn't really come up with a better option over the past 10 months. The title of the album is "I Miss You Most at Nighttime", something that came to me almost immediately a year ago when writing the original demos and it's simply stuck. Post production work aside, the album should be ready for a full listen hopefully by the end of next weekend...if I don't slit my wrists due to midi files beforehand!
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