Subject:Metronome Countoff misses first chord!

Posted by: PeterWright

Date:11/1/2008 12:32:08 AM

I am building a trial project which has a Midi Track chord starting at 1.1.000

When I play from the beginning, I hear this chord, but when I enable the Metronome Countoff, this first chord does not play, and the first thing I hear is the second lot of notes.

Do I have a setting wrong?

edit: Just added a drum track (new Kitcore) and this plays right from the start, both with and without the Metronome Countoff, but the other track (DLS Elec Piano) still misses the first chord when countoff is used.

Subject:RE: Metronome Countoff misses first chord!

Reply by: JohnnyRoy

Date:11/1/2008 5:03:24 AM

What might be happening is that the count-off is discarding notes prior to the first beat. If you hit the chord a millisecond before the downbeat, it may be getting discarded. Try playing it slightly retarded. You can always move it closer to the beginning in the editor.

If you want to test this theory, create an empty MIDI event that is two measures long. Press record but don't play until the second measure (i.e., make the first measure your count-off.) Now go back into the MIDI editor and zoom all the way in and see if any of your notes were slightly ahead of the downbeat. If they are, this is why count-off is discarding them. They are happening before the song "officially" begins. One fix that ACID could make would be to have any notes played prior to the start be moved to the start.

This is why not having the count-off never bothered me. People approach a project likes it's the final cut. They want it to precisely start at the beginning. I come from the world of tape. You roll the tape, the drummer clicks his sticks and you start the song. When you are ready to master, you trim the count off from the 2-track master recording. So I have no problem with laying down a count and capturing the performance as it happens and then mastering it in Sound Forge where I trim off the count.

I use SmartLoops Pro Drum Works a lot and it has a wave called "Count Off 1234.wav" which is a drummer clicking his sticks just like when I play with live musicians. My typical workflow is to add the count-off wav, add a reference drum loop (even if it's not the final one) and then record my MIDI. I almost never play to a click track. If ACID didn't have a metronome at all I would never miss it because I rarely use it. You play differently when you play to a real drum beat than you do a sterile metronome. Metronomes are for practicing scales. ;-)

~jr

Subject:RE: Metronome Countoff misses first chord!

Reply by: PeterWright

Date:11/1/2008 4:49:10 PM

Thanks Johhny, but that wasn't it - I didn't "play" the notes, I painted them in with the draw tool, and it doesn't appear possible to go back before 1.1.000.
Funnily enough, the drum track (Kitcore) which I DID play in tempo using the count in does play right from the start, with or without the count in, so this seems to be instrument specific - I'll try some more tests with different sounds and see what happens ....

Like you, I never missed not having a count in - I played my own for the first bar or two, just like a drummer, and the song starts at bar 2 or 3 .... but having this feature now I'd like it to work as it should.

Subject:RE: Metronome Countoff misses first chord!

Reply by: darrena

Date:11/1/2008 11:57:32 PM

I have seen a bunch of problems with MIDI notes quantized exactly at the first beat in a clip or a project. I think there are some bugs here. For example, when you freeze tracks, notes that start exactly on the first beat of the project get lost. Similarly, when you render a VSTi MIDI track to audio and the loop region starts exactly when the clip does, any notes on the first beat (quantized exactly) will not be heard in the audio clip generated.

Subject:RE: Metronome Countoff misses first chord!

Reply by: Geoff_Wood

Date:11/2/2008 12:02:15 PM

Yeah, I used to always do this too, but it does throw the counter off by that bar or two.

geoff

Subject:RE: Metronome Countoff misses first chord!

Reply by: pwppch

Date:11/2/2008 7:39:26 PM

Peter,

I have reproduce this problem. I am only seeing it with the DLS soft-synth.

I have added it to the bug database.

Thanks
Peter

Subject:RE: Metronome Countoff misses first chord!

Reply by: PeterWright

Date:11/2/2008 8:35:48 PM

Thanks Peter - Yes, I changed to another soft synth, which works ok, so it does seem to be DLS only.

Incidentally, I changed Elec Piano instrument from DLS to Aria in the Track Header and couldn't hear anything - eventually I created a new track alongside, assigned it to Aria and dragged the midi events across and they worked fine. I probably missed something, but what should the steps be to change from one soft synth to another?

Subject:RE: Metronome Countoff misses first chord!

Reply by: pwppch

Date:11/2/2008 9:27:54 PM

Incidentally, I changed Elec Piano instrument from DLS to Aria in the Track Header and couldn't hear anything - eventually I created a new track alongside, assigned it to Aria and dragged the midi events across and they worked fine. I probably missed something, but what should the steps be to change from one soft synth to another?

Did you set the MIDI track's channel to the correct ARIA channel you loaded the sample into? For example, the first 'slot' in ARIA is MIDI channel 1.

Peter

Subject:RE: Metronome Countoff misses first chord!

Reply by: PeterWright

Date:11/2/2008 9:38:21 PM

Thanks again Peter - that was it. I didn't realise the correspondence between "slots" and midi channels - in Kompakt these can be assigned as a separate operation.