FL Studio 12 Released!

[trimph1]

Aaaaarrrggh!!!

I don't even do 4/4 here!!!

I can blinking well do whatever I want with this!!!

Why not EXPERIMENT!?!?!?!?

[EvilDragon]

Isn't changing the denumerator the same as changing the snap?

Not really. Snap (if you mean snapping to beats kind of thing) has nothing to do with timesigs at all - snapping is something that's there purely to help align things on the beat. It shouldn't really change when the timesig changes - at all! If snap is set to 1/4, then entering new notes should always snap to quarters, regardless of the denominator of the timesig.

[EvilDragon]

But anyway, there are already 2 existing solutions
1. using song jump markers. So that, at beat 3 of a 3/4 part, you jump to beat 4. A bit like how trackers were doing it. There your bar #'s are still correct, and you have some "holes" in your song.

Extremely awkward. Not a real solution.

2. your own bar #'s, as markers

What will be worked on is a way to hide FL's own bar #'s, so that 2. works better, along with a "snap to bar markers", so that you can place your clips more easily when the song is all zoomed out. But really, it totally is paint-by-numbers assistance.

Now this is better, as long as there won't be too many steps necessary to do that. Ideally when you enter a timesig change, markers should be automatically placed at the point of timesig change.

...and of course this should all impact the metronome accents, as well!


BTW - will you be able to place a marker in between of a bar (so, not snapping to the edges of the squares in the playlist view)? That's very important here.

[robotmonkey]

LOL, I forgot that tony tony chopper is Gol. That would explain why your post made my blood pressure to rise to unhealthy levels. A classic example of Gol-trolling.

[tony tony chopper]

Isn't changing the denumerator the same as changing the snap?

Not really. Snap (if you mean snapping to beats kind of thing) has nothing to do with timesigs at all - snapping is something that's there purely to help align things on the beat. It shouldn't really change when the timesig changes - at all! If snap is set to 1/4, then entering new notes should always snap to quarters, regardless of the denominator of the timesig.

you mean that in a x/4 timesig, a beat doesn't last for as long as a beat in a x/8 timesig?

Really, no one can agree on things like this, how is that so?

[EvilDragon]

gol, that's not what I'm saying (but YES - all things considered, at any BPM, a beat in 4/4 lasts longer than a beat in 6/8, for example - which makes sense, since 8th notes are twice faster than quarter notes). First of all I don't know what you meant by "changing the snap". I know what snapping is, and usually it's a setting, like "snap to 1/4 note" or "snap to bar", or "snap to 1/16 note", whatever.

My point is that snapping should not depend on timesig denominator. You should be able to write a song in any timesig you want, and snap to whatever NOTE VALUE you want, separately from the timesig you're using. Timesigs have nothing to do with snapping (nor should they).

[Jace-BeOS]

Paint by number?

Why the marginalization of a tool that people use regularly, legitimately, in the composition of music?

[Jace-BeOS]

Comparing to how trackers used to get around things is not encouraging. That's workaround thinking for technical limitation, not music theory or writing software for human beings that know music (as opposed to geeking out a tech issue that only exists because of developer, hardware, or OS limitations).

[maruks]

hey, thanks for maximus!

just noticed this...

[maruks]

white dB font maybe?...

[tony tony chopper]

gol, that's not what I'm saying (but YES - all things considered, at any BPM, a beat in 4/4 lasts longer than a beat in 6/8, for example - which makes sense, since 8th notes are twice faster than quarter notes). First of all I don't know what you meant by "changing the snap". I know what snapping is, and usually it's a setting, like "snap to 1/4 note" or "snap to bar", or "snap to 1/16 note", whatever.

because the snap changes the grid. FL's denumerator isn't really one, it's there for the step sequencer.
The piano roll however has no specific subdivisions for bars, it's related to the timesig in default snap, but it's divided (visually too) by whatever you pick. So what's the difference?

Timesigs have nothing to do with snapping (nor should they).

then I don't understand why timesigs can't be something easy to understand. I've assumed - and was confirmed around me - that only the numerator was the problem, not the denominator. I don't even see how what I will implement (new bar markers) will change anything according to the denumerator.

[sjm]

I'm not sure why you find time signatures so hard to understand gol. They're really simple. You just can't think about it with a FL mindset, because FL doesn't really do time signatures. That's the problem that people want to be able to fix.

A time signature consists of two numbers. The numerator is the number of beats per bar. The denominator is the type of note corresponding to each beat. So 6/8 mean 6 beats per bar, a beat being counted for each 8th note. 4/4 is four quarter notes per bar.

Now if you only have one time signature in your song, it doesn't really matter that FL doesn't distinguish between a quarter note or an eighth note, because you simply need X number of notes per bar. But it does start to matter when you mix time signatures, because an eighth note is still an eighth note (i.e. not the same as a quarter note) when the number of notes per bar changes. If you switch from 4/4 to 7/8, what happens is that the first part has four quarter notes per bar, and the second has 7 eighth notes per bar. An eighth note is still half as long as a quarter note, so essentially the second part is an eighth note shorter than the 4/4 part. But it's important to understand that this is not the same as having the beat counted as 3.5 quarter notes; it's 7 eighth notes because you're counting from 1 to 7 (essentially twice as fast). That's why changing the number of notes per bar isn't enough - you also need to determine the type of note that represents a beat.

What you'd presumably want the piano roll to do is to display the first part (4/4) with 4 clear beat divisions (1, 2, 3, 4) and the second part with 7 clear beat divisions (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), each of which is half as long as the beats in 4/4 (because these are eight notes, not quarter notes). Note that because you want 4 clear divisions for the beats in the first part, you don't want to set the denominator to 8 (eighth notes), because then you have 8 notes per bar, when there should only be four. You don't want the eight notes to appear visually as beats, only the quarter notes.

You might want to do a music 101 course at a local school or something, because this is pretty basic stuff. It might also make more sense to you if you approach it from a more classical POV, i.e. sheet music, because the difference between quarter notes and eighth notes is very clear in sheet music, but not in a piano roll.

Seeing this in the context of FL snap makes no sense, because FL's snapping is time signature-agnostic (given that FL doesn't really have time signatures).

[tony tony chopper]

I'm not sure why you find time signatures so hard to understand gol. They're really simple.

you find what you wrote easy to understand?

it doesn't explain what is a "note", yet everything relies to it. Assuming a note isn't related to the tempo either, as a beat is - then what is a note, and where is the user interacting with that "note"?

If things were simple, if musicians weren't masochists, there would be the # of beats per bar, period. Anything more to it, I don't get it.

I feel the same about chords - I find it amazing that people "learn their chords" without even thinking of what's behind them. Better understand simple rules behind something, that learning all of its results, IMHO.

Another example, sharp vs flat notes. Anything more masochistic than this? It's just there to make things more complicated.
And yes, I can understand the centuries of history behind this - but there's already other software dedicated to all this, anyway.


But maybe it's what made FL's success, it's easy to understand, while music theory isn't (and for wrong reasons).

[maruks]

I'm not sure why you find time signatures so hard to understand gol. They're really simple. You just can't think about it with a FL mindset, because FL doesn't really do time signatures. That's the problem that people want to be able to fix.

A time signature consists of two numbers. The numerator is the number of beats per bar. The denominator is the type of note corresponding to each beat. So 6/8 mean 6 beats per bar, a beat being counted for each 8th note. 4/4 is four quarter notes per bar.

Now if you only have one time signature in your song, it doesn't really matter that FL doesn't distinguish between a quarter note or an eighth note, because you simply need X number of notes per bar. But it does start to matter when you mix time signatures, because an eighth note is still an eighth note (i.e. not the same as a quarter note) when the number of notes per bar changes. If you switch from 4/4 to 7/8, what happens is that the first part has four quarter notes per bar, and the second has 7 eighth notes per bar. An eighth note is still half as long as a quarter note, so essentially the second part is an eighth note shorter than the 4/4 part. But it's important to understand that this is not the same as having the beat counted as 3.5 quarter notes; it's 7 eighth notes because you're counting from 1 to 7 (essentially twice as fast). That's why changing the number of notes per bar isn't enough - you also need to determine the type of note that represents a beat.

What you'd presumably want the piano roll to do is to display the first part (4/4) with 4 clear beat divisions (1, 2, 3, 4) and the second part with 7 clear beat divisions (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), each of which is half as long as the beats in 4/4 (because these are eight notes, not quarter notes). Note that because you want 4 clear divisions for the beats in the first part, you don't want to set the denominator to 8 (eighth notes), because then you have 8 notes per bar, when there should only be four. You don't want the eight notes to appear visually as beats, only the quarter notes.

You might want to do a music 101 course at a local school or something, because this is pretty basic stuff. It might also make more sense to you if you approach it from a more classical POV, i.e. sheet music, because the difference between quarter notes and eighth notes is very clear in sheet music, but not in a piano roll.

Seeing this in the context of FL snap makes no sense, because FL's snapping is time signature-agnostic (given that FL doesn't really have time signatures).

when you want 7/8

why don't you set steps per bar beat to 2 instead of 4 (default), which will give you eighth-beats instead of quarter-beats

and then set beats per bar to 7 which gives you 7 of these

with this the beat-snappings and the visual beat length (distance of vertical lines) will be halfed

only problem: these settings are per project. not per pattern, not per section in pattern

if you want to keep looking at this kind of 4th and 8th at the same time, maybe you have to ask for time-devision settings per pattern?

(ps: i do see now that problem that steps per beat is an integer where in music theory 1 16/denominator isn't always an integer. no walz then in fl studio i guess except you double the beats per bar.)

[tony tony chopper]

but tweaking the # of steps per beat has more or less the same result, in the piano roll (not step sequencer) as playing with the snap, and he says that changing the snap isn't the same thing