Forum

With Belcanto (it's on the wiki - Metronome):

Setting the number of beats per bar:

empty join
metronome hey
beat input to 7 set

(You can change the number of beats per bar using:
beat input to X set
where X is the desired number of beats per bar, e.g.
beat input to 9 set)

With STAGE, you have to be running at least 1.3.17 or the last 1.4.1 experimental release to get the DRUMMER tab, or you can use my
DRUMMER tab from HERE there's a widget for BEAT INPUT or beat per bar.

keyman

I think you can do it without using Belcanto too, with just the
Metronome Beat Tap and Bar Tap keys in Drummer & Metronome Control. The keys are shown in the Pico reference.

However I can't remember which order you press them in... sorry!

That's how I did it prior to Stage. I had to do this when practicing Tubular Bells which starts off at 15/8.

Well, how to put this... reading the PICO reference as Tenebrous said;

Main Mode key + Drummer and Metronome Control - key 1 at you're rigth (holding it with the breath pipe up to bow)

you then have acces on you' re right (lit ambar) to the 6 Drummer voice loop browse the remaining two keys (on this colum) the next is used for METRONOME BEAT TAP, just tap 6 times and then the next key METRONOME BAR TAP for 7/4 for example

What's up with STAGE?!?

keyman

I tried it both ways - here are the results - both are not what I really need

a) If I use the Metronome bar tap button - I can never get out of 4 beats per measure regardless of how many times I tap. Maybe there is a technique involved, but I simply could not get it right or change anything

b) If I use STAGE I can change the beats per bar to 7, but there is nothing to change the note duration so it is always set to a quarter note resulting in 7/4 signature not 7/8 I then have to double the tempo but that obviously produces unwanted results.

What am I missing?

The beat/bar key behaviour sounds like a bug, we'll look into it.

In EigenD the beats are always considered to be crotchet beats, so you will get a halving of tempo if you define a bar as having 7 beats. However I believe that you can use floating point (fractional) values of the beat input for the metronome. Have a go at setting the beat input to 3.5 and see if this works for you. You can to this in the commander or with Stage. Using the commander type:

metronome hey
beat input to 3 . 5 set

note the space between numbers and decimal point, you need that as they are all distinct Belcanto words.

You can also easily do the same thing in Stage. The Stage control for beats has a default increment set of 1 for convenience. Using the edit tool you can change that - select the edit tool and click on the control (after unlocking the tab with the unlock on the top LH corner) the increment is at the bottom in the edit widget pane, set it to 0.5 you'll be able to adjust it in half beat increments instead.

I'll be intrigued to see your results, I don't think anyone has tried this yet., please let us know how you get on. I don't have an Eigenharp handy here to test it for you, I'll try to have play over the weekend.

John

Yes, that's what I'd expect. I assume that it didn't behave quite how you want it to. If you want to have a true 7/8 you will need to set the bar length to 7 beats, and set the tempo to the appropriate quaver (eighth note) bpm, ie twice what you'd normally set it to for the same kind of feel in a crotchet BPM. The Drummer unfortunately doesn't have a metronome divisor, so your loops will play faster than you want. This may be a nice feature to add, I'll chat with the team on Monday.

This is actually a normal kind of problem in music notation, one that we don't really solve in EigenD's metronome as yet (and I'm not sure that where it needs to be solved actually). If you were writing 6/8 or 12/8 you'd normally have a BPM in dotted crotchets, ie. 3 quaver beats long. I would assume that 7/8 would be written with a quaver bpm as 7 is prime, I can't quite see how it makes sense any other way.

The solution may be for us to add a MPM (measures, or bars, per minute) BPM value to the metronome, this is a musical time notation sometimes used, although this really just shuffles he problem around - your drummer and arranger would still be using beats not bars to play so would be going faster than you expect as you've moved the BPM to quavers.

I'm curious though, what element of EigenD doesn't behave as you want when you set the beat per bar to 3.5? Is it the loop player doing sometlhing unexpected? Or the arranger steps still being in crotchets? If its just the oop player, we may be able to easily add a way to solve that.

John

I would like to pursue, if I may, the "which did not work for me by the way" METRONOME BEAT TAP.

Could you please open EigenBrowser (cmd+B) and EigenCommander (cmd+C) and the type in bencanto:
metronome browse

You should see in the EigenBrowser the Browsing Metronome and with it have a "reading" of the tempo, beats, running, etc... try the METRONOME BEAT TAP.... (go thru the quick-reference-guide once more...)

good luck
keyman

Hi djogon

Jim and I have been talking about this morning, and looking at the way the drummer works at present and we are confused as to what you are experiencing. As far as we can tell, setting the metronome bar length to 3.5 should be completely equivalent to setting a quaver beat and 7 beats per bar, they are logically the same in the system. The drummer will play loops for 3.5 crotchets, then start them over, which is correct - if you have a 7/8 loop that you've created or downloaded this should then play correctly, and you can count the two quavers for every metronome crotchet tick. The only areas we think where it might be meaningful to have the system be aware of quaver beats would be the clicker (to help you count time) and possibly the arranger grid.

There probably is a need to make some modification to the system to support a quaver beat length, if for no other reason than to make the tap tempo function support 7/8 without all the loops playing faster (as Apple loops are intrinsically stored with beats in crotchets, or rather with just beats that seem to be assumed to be crotchets for the purpose of BPM descriptions), and we can look at this but we'd really like to understand what issue you are facing using 7/8 that isn't solved by setting the metronome beat to 3.5. Are the loops doing something that you don't expect, or think is wrong? 4/4 loops should play the first 3.5 beats then start again, missing the last quaver as one would expect moving from 4/4 to 7/8. Or did you want them to do something else?

Your input on this matter would be greatly appreciated as making the time signature handling of EigenD correct is important for us - we debated metronomes a lot in the early design phases - this is a surprisingly complex and difficult area.

John

Hi

We've had a further (lengthy) discussion about this here. There are two conclusions that we have reached.

Firstly, right now, your existing solutions are to use a full 7/8 by setting the bar length to 7 beats and setting an appropriate tempo as a quaver bpm, so nearly twice as fast as you might normally set if you were setting a crotchet bpm. This will make the loops we ship play back fast but as I don't think we ship any 7/8 loops anyway, this may not be such a problem - all the existing loops would play quite oddly in 7/8 anyway as they're all as far a I'm aware, using multiples of 4 beats as lengths. This will make the clicker and tap tempo work for you as well. The alternative is to set a bar length of 3.5 which will make loops play back at the bpm they are written for, but will make your clicker count oddly, as you point out, and tap tempo won't work.

Secondly, we've created a feature request to make some changes to the metronome and clicker to help this situation in the future. We're going to keep the system beat clock delineated in crotchet beats (it's a good thing to have a normalised value for things like this as it seriously cuts down on the potential for bugs everywhere) but we're going to add another signal to it. At present the metronome signals carry a beat clock and a bar clock (that counts how far into the bar in beats one is). We're going to add a 'beat unit' signal to this, that the clicker can use to determine how often per crotchet beat it should tick, so if for example the 'beat unit is set to 8 it would assume that the beat unit is quavers and tick twice per crotchet. The 'beat unit' will be like the bottom of a time signature. We're also going to add a couple of ports to the metronome, 'beats per bar' and 'beat unit', effectively the top and bottom values of a conventional time signature, and rename the current 'beats' to 'beats per crotchet' for clarity. Logically all three of these are not really needed, but it will certainly save getting a calculator out to work out a basic time signature - we will have it so that changing one changes the others appropriately. We'll then update the clicker to use the 'beat unit' signal to decide when to click. The exiting tempo will remain the same, set in crotchet beats, some simple arithmetic may be needed sometimes to set an explicit tempo in an odd beat unit.

We've scheduled this to go into 1.4, if it goes well it will, otherwise it'll end up in the 2.X series.

Comments welcome..

John

John,

Thanks for the tips John. I have downloaded the EigenD source code, and will definitely reference this thread in future when I start studying it!

Brian