GGrewve Fill Dictionaries

Today was yet another huge leap forward for GGrewve.  I coded a second dictionary loading into the program so that it now keeps two dictionaries in memory: one for the main style, and one for fills.  Basically, a fill dictionary looks and functions exactly like a normal dictionary.  I wrote a small MIDI file that contained several nice fills and then passed it through GGrewveWriter, yielding a fill dictionary.  Along the way I had to do a lot of bugfixing on GGrewveWriter, which threw a fit because the fill patterns were a bit different from normal patterns.

At any rate, after everything was said and done, GGrewve was intelligently using a fill dictionary to make entrances as well as highlight fourth-measures.  The result?  Awesome.  Simply awesome.  It sounds great - it sounds real.  Even more impressive, GGrewve displays great inventiveness in using the fills.  As I explained the process of grammatical subdivision before, GGrewve basically chops up the MIDI files I give it and recombines them using intelligent analysis.  Not only were many of the fills very inventive (I wouldn't have thought to make them), they were coherent and well-placed!  I wasn't just hearing a repeat of the file I had fed into GGrewveWriter.  I was hearing an elaboration on those files - the same style, but not the same pattern.  GGrewve was not mimicking my speech, it was mimicking my ideas with its own speech (to use a linguistic metaphor).

GGrewve is by far my most impressive plugin so far, and with a solid drum plugin to depend on, I know it can only get better from here.

GGrewveWriter Analysis Tool

The development of GGrewve is going well, but rather slowly. This is partly because of the difficulty in expanding the dictionary. This is not an unfamiliar problem: I ran into the same issues with Variating Drummer. It's generally difficult to write drum patterns in anything short of a full-blown sequencer. Since writing a sequencer is beyond my capabilities, I have developed a pretty cool alternative.

Enter GGrewveWriter, the intelligent drum pattern analysis tool that disects a drum beat and packages it up for use with GGrewve.

In a nutshell, GGrewveWriter takes a MIDI file that contains a drum beat, splits the beat up into sections of an appropriate length, and derives "words" from these small sections. GGrewveWriter pays close attention to the placement of words within the original beat and the subtleties of wordly interactions. GGrewveWriter then creates a compressed dictionary file that contains all the grammatical data about the drum beat found in the MIDI file. This compressed dictionary can be read directly by GGrewve, and is actually more efficient than the uncompressed dictionaries used previously.

The whole thing is very impressive in practice.

It took me no more than a few minutes to write eight measures of a neat little drum beat in a sequencer and export it to a MIDI file. After exporting, I let GGrewveWriter go to work with the file. After only a few seconds, I had a fresh compressed dictionary sitting in the folder. I loaded the dictionary into GGrewve and let the generation begin. Sure enough, out came forty measures (I had requested this much) of well-placed, humanized drum beat. I had actually made the original MIDI beat sound very stale (I did not vary the volume levels at ALL, so it sounded very robotic) to see how well the humanization routines within Grewve were working. Sure enough, the computer's output sounded a heck of a lot more human than the beat that I, a human, had created. The output was varied and clearly derived from my beat, but not exactly a copy and pleasantly unpredecatable.

Writing the beat, creating the dictionary, and generating took about seven minutes. Had I tried to achieve the same thing with the Variating Drummer, it would have taken hours and hours and the final result would not have been as impressive.

This is a very successful test for GGrewve, and I look forward to more impressive results in the future (we may finally be ready for drum fills!)