ABSTRACT
In a musical sense, a groove is the rhythmic feel of a song or beat, but more than that, it is a real-world phenomenon that occurs when a human performs a piece of music live (onstage) or in a recording session. It is the breath of life that makes music come alive, breathing with the beat. Each performer or band generates their own groove when they play and perform, in turn stamping their own music or style with a signature. Their respected fans and admirers often seek after this “signature sound”. In an effort to recreate this experience in the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), Live has its own groove technology called Groove. The goal of groove technology is to breathe life into clips when they lack the authentic feel of a real performance or to conform two different clips so they have the same feel—in other words, to either liven up a vanilla beat that doesn’t groove and is lacking soul, or to reshape the beat to emphasize a different feel than originally performed. For this reason, Live includes a number of grooves as part of the Core Library. Applying one of these grooves to your audio or MIDI clips changes its timing and feel, conforming it to the new imposed groove. But how, you ask? This is achieved by altering where the beats fall in time and applying emphasis (accents) to the beat by altering the intensity or velocity of specific beats. A prime example of this is the recreation of a swing feel (shuffle). A real swing feel is not something you can mathematically quantize in the digital realm. It is truly a human experience that doesn’t have an exact formula. With Live’s groove technology, you can take that real inexplicable human feel and apply it to a straight beat. Even better, extract it from a real-world recorded performance or studio recording. Who needs the mathematical equations when you can get the groove direct from the source! This is all managed at the Clip Groove chooser menu available from the Clip View Clip Box https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780240817903/f462ec71-e9ed-4786-a885-0317327f97aa/content/ufig12_1_C.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>. That’s already been discussed, so let’s take a close look at how Grooves and the Groove Pool work. Then we’ll discuss how to Extract and Commit Grooves.
