Please familiarise yourself with the forum, including policy on feature requests, rules & guidelines

Force-start a track from beginning?

0
hurphendalehurphendale PragueBeta Tester Posts: 39

I'm playing in a group and have a long bass line that starts out muted, and I bring it in later in the song. Often it ends up coming in on the middle of the bass line, but I need it to always start at the beginning. The overall musical arrangement with the group I play in is pretty fluid and generally out of my control. I need to tell the deluge "start this bass line now", and be sure it's going to start at the next end of the drum pattern, and at the beginning.

For illustration purposes, let's say I have a 4-bar drum track loop, and an 8-bar bass line track. I start the song with a muted bass track, and after a minute or so, the other members of the band start a progression which leads to me unmuting the bass line. More often than note what end up happening is the bass line starts at, say, bar 5 while the drum loops back to bar 1. So it plays the second half of the bass line before the first part.

Comments

  • 0
    amiga909amiga909 Central EuropePosts: 1,078

    You are in Arranger or Song mode? You launch a section or you unmute a track?
    " bass line starts at, say, bar 5 while the drum loops back to bar 1"
    What might to do the trick for you: Double the lenght of the 4-bar drum track loop to 8 bars.

  • 0
    hurphendalehurphendale PragueBeta Tester Posts: 39

    I'm in Song mode, because the tracks usually just loop indefinitely while I bring in/out pieces. And yeah, I'm unmuting the track. As for extending the drum track to match the length of the bassline, is there any useful trick to managing doubling up the drum track? (actually it would be x4, as in reality, the drums are in a 4 bar loop, while the bassline stretches over 16 bars. - I was just keeping it simple to illustrate the issue).

    I looked into whether or not Arranger mode might give me some better control, but it seems like I would need to statically decide on the length of the entire song, which won't work for me, I need the song to just keep going until we decide it's done (different every time).

  • 1
    duelinmarkersduelinmarkers Austin TX USPosts: 137

    This isn't a general solution, but one way to make sure a long part starts on the next measure is to have only one-measure parts playing up to that point. With note probability and iteration dependence you can keep those parts from being too repetitive. Still, that limits what you can do in those parts, and programming parts that make heavy use of those features can be mentally taxing.

  • 1
    duelinmarkersduelinmarkers Austin TX USPosts: 137

    Another (admittedly hacky) approach capitalizing on one-measure tracks would be to have the part you bring in late start with a one-measure track that you bring in with shift-unmute. Regardless of where your other tracks are, your one measure part will start in time.

    Assuming you want a longer part (of n measures), you could string that one-measure track together with another that includes measures 2–n and then a third that has the full n measures, which can loop indefinitely.

  • 0
    hurphendalehurphendale PragueBeta Tester Posts: 39

    Good ideas, thanks for the suggestions, will give them a for at rehearsal tonight :)

  • 0
    TricepTricep United KingdomPosts: 2
    edited March 2019

    Hi guys, sorry to hijack the post, I've just joined the forum and I want to post a question but I can't see anywhere to create a new post? I am I being really stupid? I tried clicking the speech bubble in the top right of the site and it says "permission restriction". I'm on the mobile site. Cheers

    Post edited by Tricep on
  • 0
    hurphendalehurphendale PragueBeta Tester Posts: 39

    Do you see 'New Discussion' on the top right of the screen? If not, perhaps you need to validate your email address or something?

  • 0
    TricepTricep United KingdomPosts: 2

    I've got the speech bubble in the top right but when I click it it says "Permission Problem. You don't have permission to do that" maybe I need to wait for the administrator to approve my account before I can create a post

  • 1
    duelinmarkersduelinmarkers Austin TX USPosts: 137

    @hurphendale, I thought of a third way to achieve this.

    Using your example of a 4-bar drum track and an 8-bar bass track that you want to bring in at an arbitrary bar of the performance: create a 1-bar drum fill part using the same kit as your long drum track. Say you want to start your bass part on what would be measure 2 of the drum track. During measure 1, shift-unmute your fill track. It will immediately interrupt your long drum track, picking up mid-measure in time. Then immediately unmute (without shift) both your long drum track and your long bass track. They'll both start on the next measure.

    This also has the effect of getting the two tracks playing in sync (as you probably intended).

    Needless to say, the fill track doesn't have to be noticeably different from a measure of the drum track.

    An alternative is to shift-mute the drum part instead of using the fill track.

  • 0
    duelinmarkersduelinmarkers Austin TX USPosts: 137

    @hurphendale, did you find any of these suggestions workable or find a different workaround?

Sign In or Register to comment.