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Gadget scene timing NIGHTMARES...!
Hello! I spent around FIVE HOURS last night trying to perfect my sequence timing on a Gadget song I'm working on. The scenes I'm working with are on the longer end of the spectrum - around 8 to 10 bars. I'm having trouble sequencing everything so that the scenes and the piano roll notes end and begin when I want them to.
For example, I have a melody going in Chicago and another going in Dublin. My Chicago tune is about 8 bars long. I want the one in Dublin to be a little longer - let's say 10 bars. Ideally, the Chicago tune would finish and then start all over again and just keep playing, but what happens is when my 10 bars of Dublin finish, Chicago is 2 bars in and then starts over again at the next scene and it sounds awful. This leads me to run around trying to shift the timing of everything, but of course nothing I did worked. I felt like one of those cartoon characters patching a leak only to have another even bigger one break out right after.
So, my question is this: is there a way to make this work that I'm overlooking, or is this just a limitation of gadget / the whole "scene" workstation layout? If I want to fix this am I better off just making all of the instruments have the exact same number of bars, biting the bullet and rewriting my song to make it fit in that framework? Would you say having everything be the same number of bars when composing is generally the best strategy to prevent this sort of thing from happening again, or are there other composition tips you could offer up?
THANK YOU!
Comments
Could you just make all the Bar lengths the same? Your Chicago track can be 10 Bars, but only have notes for 8 Bars as you sequenced...this way it plays in sync with the 10 Bar Dublin track.
If your Bar lengths aren't aligned you will end up with things getting out of sync...the beauty of polyrhythms.
Just a thought.
Usually all you need to do is make sure all the patterns can be divided by the same number. For instance, if you have a ten bar pattern, then make sure all the patterns are either 2, 5 or 10 bars long.
However, for your example of 8 bar and 10 bar, you just need to add two empty measures to the 8 bar pattern to make it 10 bars too.
Yep. Sorry.
This is one of the workarounds I tried but I want the chicago loop to start right over - with the two extra bars there, there is just of course silence. So it seems like what zpxing confirmed is the case here.
You could copy and paste the two bars you need and add it to the 10 bars. Hard to know if this will work as i have no idea if your loop will fit this way 😬
Gadget isn’t intended for that sort of scenario. It is built to facilitate simple structures where parts share a common multiple and the longest part is no more than 16 bars.
You will need to use something else for more sophisticated structures or if notes need to cross section boundaries.
EDIT: As someone points out below, the different parts in a scene (or whatever one line of Gadget's display is called) can have different lengths and each will loop independently until you change the scene. There is a handy popup window that you get with settings when you tap Function and then tap on the length displayed. It pops up a window with loop/one-shot options and also lets you change the length.
I thought of this too, but then that screws up the timing of the next scene
So, it seems like I'm in a bit of a pickle here regarding this particular project. It sucks but it is what it is. So, for the future, is the best way to go just keeping to what wim said about all the bars being divisible by the same number? Any other tips to avoid this kind of thing?
Right! But I love how many instruments come in Gadget - just to confirm, it should be simple enough to use a different sequencer app (I've been eyeballing Xequence, for example) to still use them but without these sequencing limitations?
You can send midi to Gadget and use the Gadget sounds but do your sequencing elsewhere.
@nabelnabel
All you have to do is hit the loop button.
Xequence 2 + Gadget = Awesomness.
The only hitch is when it comes to rendering your tracks. You either need to record the midi from Xequence 2 into Gadget to export audio, whereby you're stuck back in the 16 bar scenes, or you need to record Gadget's audio output in another app. Since Gadget doesn't have multiple outs, you have to do it one track at a time if you need individual track exports.
Excellent! I have Audiobus + Share so that's no problem. Okay, this is great information. Thanks so much for the help everyone, I really appreciate it.
I actually use this capability quite a lot in my songs, the latest album Art & Crime & Magic makes heavy use of intermeshing bar patterns, for example some instruments will repeat at 3 bars, some at 4 bars, some at 5 bars, intentionally ( https://youtu.be/M8Tiglg9XrU this typifies it, once the intro is over, the bass meshes differently to the lead, which meshes differently to the singing, etc).
One thing you can do though is to set a scene pattern of an instrument to be one-shot rather than repeat, which will fire it once at the start and when it ends it just runs out, until something else (it’ll be the longest-patterned contributing instrument to that scene) causes the scene to jump to the following scene. That way you can chop your patterns down into many smaller ones which allow finer control of looping and repeating and one-shottedness and that sort of thing.
Thanks! I need to edit my earlier post. I don't know how I missed that dialog with the loop/one-shot/bar length settings. I just confirmed that one can have unrelated lengths in the parts in a section. Cool!
Oh, brilliant! Yes, you just hit function in the sequence roll and toggle it to one shot. That's an excellent tip, thanks so much.