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Question about Beat Wizard and VU Wizard on S2


Randy

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I am running S2 (2.0.14) and am now starting to experiment with features like the Beat Wizard and the VU Wizard....

I normally use 0.05 timing in my songs, so I started with a blank sequence and played with both of the wizards...

Maybe a dumb question, but I can't get either one of these two wizards to work without inserting small timing changes to the 0.05 grid, even when I choose "Turn on a channel so many beats" instead of "Insert a timing event into the track for each beat"...

I seem to recall someone else mentioning this awhile back, but couldn't find it...

Is it just me doing something wrong? I just want to get beat marks inserted into an existing 0.05 timing structure.....

Thanks for any help, Randy

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There are several ways to do this. This is how I used the Beat Wizard on an existing sequence that I originally created with LOR 1 using .05 timings:

  1. Select an entire row with "Edit" -> "Select" -> "Row(s)".
  2. Right click on this row and "Delete Selected Timings". Don't worry! Unlike LOR 1, this will not change the events already in the sequence. In LOR 2, the timing of an event does not have to occur at the vertical timing lines.
  3. Run the Beat Wizard and select "Insert a timing event into the track for each beat."
  4. Follow the Beat Wizard instructions posted elsewhere.

At this point your events will still be aligned on .05 boundaries, and many will probably not be aligned on the new beat timing marks, so you'll clean the sequence around the timing marks.

Say you have 200 BPM (.3 seconds) and you need to do an effect closer to your original .05 timings. Select the time range where this effect is to be, right-click and select "Subdivide Timings". Enter 4 and you will have .075 timings for this section. If you have this requirement throughout the song, then duplicate the track with timings, subdivide the timings in the new track and name it something like "Fast". This will let you switch between single beats and 1/16 notes.

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You can also use tracks. Create a new track called beat wizard. With one channel. Run the beat wizard. Copy that channel back into your main track. The events will display but no timing marks will be added.

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The Beat Wizard and VU Wizard pay no attention to existing timings. They only pay attention to where they think the beats/peaks of the music are. So they're not really best used in a track with existing timings.

If you want to use both evenly spaced timings (such as your "every 0.05 seconds") and one of these wizards, the best way is probably to make two separate tracks, one with evenly spaced timings, and the other with the results of the wizard.

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I just run the wizards into a dummy track, or a set of dummy tracks. Then when I used a wizard, it adds timing marks to one of those track, I don't mind ... because these are sync'd (as bob said) to the beat and not some arbitrary timing marks.

Because you can see the events created via these wizards when back in your tradition (fixed timing track or tracks) ... you can still get an idea of where things start and stop, because you'll see the wizard created timings in your fixed timing track. This is assuming you copied the channels into another track.

I find this helpful as a reference for adding other channels into the fixed timing tracks because the timings from the beat and vu wizards are often the ones your trying to nail down using the more traditional sequencing methods. So I kind of just let the wizard created channels stay in their own track (or tracks) and then sometimes add stuff to them in the traditional timed tracks.

I've really started to use the wizards more and more as I learn how to employ them into sequencing ... and find I can create a lot of action in a short timeframe using them. Especially powerful is taking some group of channels, copying them into a new track ... then using a wizard on a certain portion of a song, then using the wizard to plug in some auto-sequencing for you for that group, that portion of the song ... really powerful. Its easy to do too-much by accident. This has helped me complete sequences a great deal faster, since I can create a lot of interesting things real quickly. THe risk (for me) is creating the same thing for the whole song and becoming a bit too boring with what is being done. So I typically prune back what a wizard did ... then maybe add a new section or sections ... either using traditional methods or with a different wizard or different wizard settings.

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