Many great pieces of music come to us from a time when popular songs were the ultimate expression of artistic talent rather than mere technological achievements. That’s not to say that good songs are no longer written today; however, in my opinion music is consumed – and produced – nowadays in such a way that more often than not it ends up being ephemeral background noise. Do you remember the last time you sat down to just listen to music?

The Eye of the Tiger by Survivor is one of the songs that has survived the test of time (pun intended), though some will say that the movie this song was written for didn’t age as gracefully, but I digress. Its rhythmic intro is so catchy that even toddlers can perform it distinctly.

I chose The Eye of the Tiger for a demo video of one of the most frequently used Chronotron features: the ability to create loops. Keep reading if you want to go through some details, otherwise skip to the video below and enjoy.

Basic Operation

The Loop In and Loop Out buttons perform the same functions as in CDJ players: press the Loop In button to set the loop start point, and when playback reaches the point where you want to start over, press the Loop Out button to set the end point and begin looping. It’s really that simple.

The Loop button toggles looping on and off. Clear Loop removes both loop points, once you confirm you really want to do so.

Adjusting Loop Points

You can adjust the loop points by dragging them around with the mouse – or the finger, if you have a touchscreen. However, there are cases when you want to change their location more precisely. The Loop pane – depicted below – allows you to manually edit the loop points either by entering their position as text (more on this below) or by increasing or decreasing their location in 25ms steps.

Whenever you make changes and the Play loop end… switch is on, Chronotron will seek closer to the end of the loop so you can hear if the loop juncture sounds right, without waiting for the whole loop to complete. This comes in handy especially when creating long loops.

In the input boxes you can enter any integer number of hours and minutes, appended with “h” and “m” respectively, and/or any number of seconds with or without decimals places, optionally appended with “s”. For example, entering “200.5” is the same as entering “200.5s”, “3m 20.5s” or “3m 20.5”.

By the way, I hear you saying that it would be great if you could also enter a number of beats in there. However, in order for such feature to be useful some more automation will be required (as of this writing Chronotron has a manual beat detector), but it is definitely in my to-do list.

The Demo Video

Here is a short video showing how the Loop feature works in Chronotron. Be warned, though: a song may stick in your head for the rest of the day.

Questions and suggestions are always very welcome.

I learned only recently that animals can exhibit handedness, or simply put, that some species statistically tend to prefer one side over the other.

In humans, the ratio of left-handed to right-handed individuals is about 1 to 9, which is pretty low. I ignore whether or not the ratio of guitarists to non-guitarists is the same for each handedness group, but still, I kind of suspect that left-handed guitarists are a minority. Suffice to check the price tag of the LH guitar variant as compared to the same “standard” model – which by the way isn’t even labelled as RH. Talk about offer and demand in play!

Seriously, though, I thought it would be a good idea to do something in Chronotron to help musicians learn songs regardless of their handedness. Left-handed pianos not being mainstream yet, this post is mainly for those who play other instruments, though you can of course use Chronotron no matter what instrument you play.

Video Flipping

For us right-handed guitarists, watching a video of a left-handed player and figuring out what she’s doing shouldn’t be more difficult than watching ourselves play in front of a mirror, right? Try that. For whatever reason the mirrored fingering looks really awkward.

In Chronotron, you can apply a mirror effect during video playback by turning on the corresponding switch in the Adjustments pane, which instantly turns Eric Clapton into his left-handed twin.

Note that in the current and earlier releases (version 99) this switch has effect during playback, but not when video is rendered to disk. In the upcoming release the mirroring effect will also work when rendering media.

Left-Handed Guitar and Bass Fretboards

The purpose of the on-screen instrument in Chronotron is twofold: it serves as the visual support for note detection, and it also allows you to play notes – or even chords, if you have a touchscreen – on the go. You can choose between a piano keyboard, a guitar or bass fretboard.

Unsurprisingly, the fretboards are right-handed by default, but with the flip of a switch they become left-handed.

Ideas are Welcome

If you’re reading this you’re probably left-handed. Are there any other valuable features for lefties you can think of? I’m all ears.

Some of the Chronotron features are rooted in my own usage, others are the result of customer feedback and a few of them are just there for historical reasons. Then, there are those features that every media player must have, which we just take for granted and rarely think about how they actually work.

Examples of the latter are the Balance control and the Graphic Equalizer. Most people are already familiar with balance and equalization so maybe that’s why I seldom, if ever, get any questions about these features. However, while implementing them I did have questions for which I had to figure out the answers. In this post I’m sharing a couple of such questions – and their answers – with you.

The Chronotron Equalizer

What Pan Law to Use for the Balance Control?

In a nutshell, the pan law governs how much you attenuate or amplify the audio signal to compensate for the gradual loss of the left or right channel as you move the balance control in the opposite direction. A lot has been written about pan laws elsewhere so I’m not going to enter into the details.

Chronotron uses a 3dB pan law, which means that it boosts the remaining channel progressively, by up to 3dB, as the fading channel becomes less audible. This keeps the perceived volume reasonably constant during playback and is the same pan law used by many audio equipment.

If you google for articles on pan laws, you may be wondering why I didn’t choose to apply a higher boost, like 4.5dB or 6dB. After all, Chronotron is a media player and not really a mixing app, right?

Well, there are karaoke videos, music lessons and play-along CDs that take advantage of stereo channel separation to let you adjust the level of the backing track vs. the lead instrument just by using the balance control. In Chronotron, balance is applied before the Solo Channel setting, so if you come across this kind of audio material, you can set Solo Channel to MONO to enjoy sound from both speakers while still controlling the mix with the balance control. Handy, isn’t it? In this situation Chronotron behaves like a mixer and the 3dB pan law is still a reasonable tradeoff.

The above example illustrates the well-known fact that the order in which audio controls and effects are applied can sometimes make a big difference, which led me to the following question…

Should the Graphic Equalizer Come Before or After Tempo and Key Manipulation?

I made a case for putting the balance control before any further processing, but what about the equalizer? If we put the equalizer before tempo change and note detection, we cold leverage its effect to prevent some time-stretching artifacts or to improve the accuracy of the detected notes. If we put it after, we could use it to fine-tune the final result for a particular listening environment, for example.

I thought it would be a good idea giving users the choice and that’s what the Pre/Post switch does.

The default position of the switch is Post, which means that equalization occurs – just like in many other media players – at the end of the sound processing chain. In this position the equalizer does its expected job without causing any side effects.

In the Pre position, though, things get more interesting because you can now use the equalizer to make the note detector emphasize a certain frequency range. Also, when using the equalizer as a notch filter, you will notice that its effect will be preserved even after changing pitch.

The choice is yours.

Have Questions? Feel Free to Ask

Ask questions via the Chronotron web site or by posting your comments here. Unfrequently asked ones are welcome!