Time signature/looping nightmare?

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Fabuloso

Post by Fabuloso » Wed Aug 20, 2003 3:23 am

Hey, all. I'm having a hellish time looping a piece of music I'm sequencing. All sound ends during the middle of a measure, and no matter how many different ways I alter the time signature, I come up with no difference...I don't at all like the idea of copying the first run and pasting it into a middle of a measure, and I equally dislike the idea of entering time into the beginning of a piece to round things off.

The piece that I'm sequencing is a popular game tune, and, as far I can tell, my version is accurate...this is not to say that the piece ends at the middle of a measure--I've taken a look at a different translation of the piece, and it loops cleanly...yet there seems to be no noticeable difference between them...I've gone as far as to compare the two versions' number of beats per series of measures, and emm, this is hell.

Is it something small, notationally, that I have incorrect....or is it a time signature issue?

Thanks,
-Fabuloso


Brian D

Post by Brian D » Wed Aug 20, 2003 3:52 am

There could be a number of variables associated with your problem. First let's look at time signatures.

I am sure you know what a time signature does, but let's just refresh both of our memories. Let's take a simple time signature of 4/4. The top number tells use that there will be four beats per measure. Then the bottom number tells us that the quarter note will get one beat. So could that be the problem? I don't think so.

There is also the duration, or length, a note is held during its "on" time. And with that, the instrument that is being used on that note.

A piano that is playing a whole note will eventually die before reaching the end of the measure. That is the nature of the piano. The organ, however, will hold the note all the way to the end of the measure.

In Cake Wlak, the durations are 4:000 for a whole note, 2:000 or a half, 1:000 for a quarter, 0:060 for an eighth, 0:030 for a sixteenth, and 0:015 for a thirty-second note.

If you have a whole note displayed but it seems to be dying in the middle of a measure, right click on the note and look at its duration. I should be equal to what a whole note gets.

Now a caveat; if you have a 5/4 measure and have a whole note in the measure, it will still only get a 4 count then stop. You will have to give it a duration of 5:000 in order for the note to sound the whole measure.

Don't know if that will help you. Good luck.

Fabuloso

Post by Fabuloso » Wed Aug 20, 2003 6:53 pm

Thanks for the reply!

Yeah, I know what a time signature is, but I'm not completely sure of what it does. Is it simply that it works to clearly delineate measures? To make them more digestable, smaller bites?

I always thought that note durations were independant of the time signature...I wonder if it could be that I ran even a single set of notes for too long, and so, added another baseline to compensate...

I made the mistake of adding time to the beginning, so that things would end cleanly--when I wanted to correct it later, it wasn't just a matter of selecting all the tracks and then sliding them back a second...firstly, cakewalk wouldn't let me do it, and secondly, when I tried to select a whole track, only certain parts of it would highlight....thirdly, and most annoyingly of all, because of the lack of clearly delineated measures, it was impossible for me to manually highlight an entire track without getting bits of empty air at the beginning and end that I didn't want...bits that would invariably carry over when I would slide. No fun.

So, to end this tale of woe...After fiddling with each track, and various chunks of each track, trying to slide them all back a second, and trying to make it all groove again, I was left with a complete, tortured mess...I chalked it all up to my inexperience with durations and/or time signatures, and chucked the piece out the window. But damnations, I want to learn!

Thanks again,
-Fabuloso

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