Creator for Atari

[Syntho]

I was doing some reading about the old school midi stuff and Creator on the Atari supposedly has some sort of magic going on in it. I keep hearing about its rock solid timing. Why else is Creator on the Atari so good?

In particular I’m interested in the drum replacement workflow with Creator. I’ve read that some people, after recording drums to tape, would trigger samples from Creator using that midi/SMPTE interface that I can’t remember the name of. I’m going to guess that SMPTE was striped onto a spare track on the tape, then run into the SMPTE/midi interface and the drums were programmed and quantized by hand that way.

So it got me thinking. It’s either those guys manually input each and every kick/snare by hand, or, somehow they got a midi generated from the original analog tracks (like running a kick or snare signal into a drum module’s trigger inputs and recording the midi output to get a rough midi to work from).

Two things I wonder about are:

1) SMPTE to midi accuracy. MTC is only 1/4 frame accurate, so I wonder how things didn’t fall apart because of it, especially when blending a sample with the original snare track for example. Maybe the Atari was capable of syncing better than 1/4 frame accuracy due to some really good programming under the hood?

2) if you wanted to have things show up as ‘on the bar lines’, I imagine some serious retiming would have to have been done. Different metronomes have slightly different timing, and tape can drift too, so I don’t imagine anything was programmed where everything was perfectly locked to a grid. I’m guessing that instead of that, the midis were pretty much always off by at least a few ticks but it didn’t matter because as long as it matched up with what was on tape, they could just tab over to the next midi event no matter its location and nudge it to where it’s supposed to be.

Also, there would’ve had to been some serious SMPTE offsetting and delay compensation (drum module or sampler delays) to get things to match up. That’s why I’m thinking bar lines, measures etc were all ignored and it was edited more in free time. Midi notes were probably just nudged by hand instead of quantized using commands, which would’ve sent them to the bars/beats and would be a disaster that way.

Can anyone comment on any of this?

[IIO]

not sure what smpte has to do with. i guess the normal way was to use an akai audio to midi trigger.

[Syntho]

Because in order for the new replacements to sound in time it had to be synced to the original tape track via SMPTE.

[IIO]

ah, tape recording, yes.

[lui_s]

Sorry, English is not my native language and if I understood correctly, here is the answer.
In Creator, it is convenient to record drum loops in MIDI, adjust each note individually (delay) to get a groove. And it doesn't fall apart throughout the song. This is the advantage of Atari. Ordinary computers are busy with other different processes and cannot accurately reproduce the groove, it is constantly different.
A multi-track tape recorder records a pilot signal (SMPT) that connects to The UNITOR set-top box (as the cartridge is connected in Atari) and starts the MIDI sequencer. Usually, vocals and guitars were written on the tape.