Hey Troy,
I’m curious to know how you recorded the clips for the Masters in Mechanics seminars, particularly Antigravity and Volcano. Did you have some sort of tempo map with a metronome in Logic and just blast through all the clips for the seminar? Or were they all recorded off the cuff with no click?
No click. It never even occurred to me to use a specific tempo for those. I just played them at whatever speed felt smooth or comfortable.
Interesting, I figured that would be the answer because I noticed for a lot of the Antigravity licks the tempo for the GPX/pdf files almost never matches what you play in the clip. Are the tempo markings just arbitrary then or does Soundslice generate them?
Soundslice just displays whatever tempo was in the tablature file. I don’t recall paying a whole lot of attention to what tempos we even notated back then, because I didn’t think it mattered. We weren’t trying to say you needed to play these examples at that exact speed in order to be correct, we were just trying to give you an example of the motion to look at as a reference. The tempo was an afterthought.
More recently when we transcribe interviews we do try to get the tempo markings close, because it’s data about how the player’s technique works, and it’s something we can learn from. i.e. Some players play certain lines at certain speeds and other lines at different ones. It’s still just a ballpark though. If a player speeds up and slows down during a clip we don’t usually notate that super specifically, but we’ll include a fermata or ballpark tempo ramp if we think it’s important.
Cool, thanks. For whatever reason I was under the impression that they were all goal tempos. I finally got the Pepsi Lick to 130 BPM and then did a tap tempo of your performance and saw it was around 145. I was just like “More practice needed…”