Channel 8 – Building The Rhythm Map

UPDATED Information about this video:

A few minor points:

• A newly created Bars and Beats channel will NOT be automatically populated with unsynchronized points – it will simply be empty.
• The Auto-Interpolate And Renumber button rarely needs to be disabled. It should be left enabled until you know you need to turn it off, temporarily.
• Reminder: to append new Bar points at the bottom of an existing Rhythm Map channel when Auto-Interpolate And Renumber is enabled, you need to add at least one empty Bar point after the last valid one, before playback starts. Just locate to the bottom of the list and type the period key, before starting playback, to add empty points. You can then start playback and resume synchronizing points normally. When you’re adding points during playback, you don’t need to do this – a new empty point will automatically be generated each time you add one at the bottom of the list.

And we have two really powerful new features:

• The Insert Bar 1 button (similar to the Insert Pickup Bar button):

  It’s often difficult to sync the very first beat of a song, because there’s nothing in the recording that tells you when it will start – there’s just some short length of silence before the music begins. When this happens, you can simply ignore Bar 1, and start syncing from Bar 2 (though the list will display this as Bar 1, initially). When you’re satisfied that your Bar 2 (the list’s Bar 1) starts correctly, click this button to create a new Bar 1, which will start one bar earlier than the first one you synced. If it’s not perfect, you can tweak it with manual editing, but if you’re careful, it’ll be easy to get it right..

• The Create Loops From Annotations button:

  This does exactly what it says: it creates Loops from any Annotations that exist within the Rhythm Map channel. The Start and End times of the Loop will be the Start and End times of the Annotation, so usually you don’t want to use this button until after you’ve quantized the boundary times of the Annotation. That way, you’ll automatically get Loops that make musical sense, with precise timing – usually, they’ll be some number of whole bars. The newly created loops will be added to a new Rhythm Map channel called User-Created Loops, which is used to populate the popup menu of Loop names that the user sees.

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