MB3 audio clicks

BETA TESTING
1

Well, I’ve just been experimenting with the beta.

I’m recording a rock song with a sort of swing blues feel, and I thought I would like to duplicate the bass line on a synth bass for extra depth.

So I took the bass track and ran it through MIDI bass. So of course this is a bass part originally played without any thought of converting it to MIDI.

The result was frankly disappointing. You can hear the ‘outline’ of the bass riff in the resulting MIDI, but there is a forest of ‘ghost’ notes all over the place. I tried fiddling with noise gate and gain controls, but couldn’t get it to clean up well: either it misses too many real notes or generates too many false triggers.

I may be able to clean it up with some serious MIDI editing, but I have to say this doesn’t seem anywhere near ready for live use at the moment.

If anyone is interested, I can supply the original bass audio track and the resulting MIDI.

2

Please send me the bass track (dry bass audio recording only) and I’ll take a look at it.

3

OK, here it is.

Equipment notes: played on an Aria SB1000, tone & volume full up, straight into the instrument input of my audio interface & thence to Reaper. No effects of any kind.

Now I listen to it isolated myself, it’s sloppy as all hell, and there do seem to be some odd clicks that I don’t understand… my excuse: this was a one-take on a first demo sketch…
At least this will embarrass me into doing a better take… :slight_smile:

4

Thank you. I will take a look at it, but I think those clicks are why you get tracking issues…

5

Yes, I’m not sure where those come from. They tend to disappear in a full mix…
I will investigate myself.

6

It may be because the MB3 tracker is quite intensive right now, and your system can’t keep up, also with other things going on in Reaper. In next update MB3 will run multi-threaded and it should be much less CPU intensive.

7

Interesting. I will run the conversion again and look at CPU usage in task manager.
I haven’t noticed Reaper being particularly CPU-intensive in the past, but I’ll let you know if I see anything odd…

8

Tried that. By the way, I had all other tracks muted, so Reaper should not be doing any processing on anything else.

Looks as if it’s running at about 19% CPU during the conversion, so it doesn’t immediately look as if CPU saturation is an issue.

CPU is 12th Gen Intel(R) Core™ i5-12400, 2500 Mhz, 6 Core(s), 12 Logical Processor(s),
running Windows 11, by the way.

A good question is, where are those clicks coming from? Could I be hitting the pickups accidentally as I play? To Be Investigated…

9

I think the clicks arise because the MB3 tracker is intensive on the CPU right now.
Sorry - you can’t really do anything about it, other than wait for next beta update (or get a Mac :face_with_hand_over_mouth:)

10

To me it sound indeed like as if the pick you are using is hitting the PU.

11

I think our posts crossed. The clicks are actually there on the audio track, so it’s something to do with my setup or playing.

I’ll try some more takes tomorrow… it’s dinner time here in the UK!
Cheers folks.

12

I think you could be right. I did indeed play that track with a pick. I’ve never noticed this before, but I’ll look into it…?

13

Back in the saddle. Next thing I tried was a rather sharp low-pass filter at 500 HZ before MBASS.

That improved matters somewhat; got rid of the clicks and a lot of the false triggers, though not all.

I think a large part of the problem is that I was sort of ‘sliding in’ to notes (in accordance with the rather sloppy swing blues feel of the song) rather than going for technical precision. Rather too much so, I guess.

I’ll try a few more takes shortly.

14

it may be worth looking at your intonation and pickup height. this is more in regard to the ghost notes than the clicks, although if your pickup is too high clicks could result.

15

Been a while since I had this bass worked on, though it did have a professional setup a few years ago.

But it is a pretty high-end instrument (Jack Bruce played one for a while, for what it’s worth). In fact one of the things I really like about it is the stability: its tuning seems rock solid. I’d always check with an electronic tuner before a gig and almost never had to adjust anything.

Not sure if the pickup height is very adjustable… it’s an active bass with only one pickup.
I fear my technique has gotten a bit rusty since I haven’t been playing out much since covid…
need to do a few more takes and pay attention to bad habits I may have developed… :wink:

16

you can be perfectly in tune on the open strings while up on the neck things are completely out of whack.

as an instrument ages and is exposed to humid summers/dry winters, the intonation will eventually need to be adjusted.

it’s easy to check - the 12th fret harmonic should match the fretted note.

17

Completely understood. I haven’t checked the fretted vs harmonic intonation on my SB1000 for a while, though it would probably be a good idea.

I’m hoping all should be in order; this bass has been a very stable and reliable instrument for 30+ years.
Still, no harm to check. I do know how to correct intonation, of course: there are individual string bridge saddles which can be independently adjusted.

We may be getting a bit off topic here: the original question was about ghost notes using MIDI bass…
Could just be lousy technique on my part… as I said, I’ll try a few more takes…

18

the reason i brought intonation up was the ghost notes.

19

I just made a quick test using the audio track you posted. I de-clicked it with the Ozone RX11 de-clicker and compared the MIDI output from the original to the modified file. It’s better after de-clicking but still not really free of glitches. The amount of MIDI events came down drastically though the settings of MB3 were the same. Increasing the gate might reduce some more unwanted notes but might also eliminate “good” ones. You should try to play in a constant volume and/or first “polish” up the audio file (normalizing, EQing etc.).
I don’t know whether your recorded file in the DAW is also stereo but it might help already to keep the Bass as a mono file.

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20

I haven’t used that; may have a look. Doesn’t seem to be cheap, though.

It’s mono in the DAW. I accidentally exported it as a stereo file, my mistake.

I admit, listening to it isolated, that this is a very sloppy take: a one-shot first sketch for a demo.
If nothing else, this will embarrass me into playing a better version… :slight_smile: