I got a question from 1minutemiracles on twitter:
do you know any gear that does this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JRpExKYumM but the other way around?
ie. the drum machine would control the tempo of some external audio source.
This is a good question, and it’s definitely possible. Here’s the thing though: You have to remove CD-Js from the equation because they don’t warp music. Off the top of my head, programs like Traktor, Torq and Ableton Live are all able to warp a track of music, and then have the tempo of that music controlled by any midi clock.
So if you watch the video that’s linked to, you would run the drum machine into the Redsound device, and then it will send a midi clock signal over to your computer.
I’m guessing that there are DJ apps which can do this without the use of the Redsound device (possibly Traktor?). Some VJ programs have this functionality built in cause it’s more important for that market.
So that makes me think there are standalone apps that are able to analyze the tempo of an incoming sound and spit out a midi clock, but in this case when timing is so imperitive I feel like hardware analyzers have a big advantage here.