External Tempo Control of Tap Tempo

[Don G]

Does anyone know of an off-the-shelf device that can receive an audible click feed, generally from a click track coming from the stage, and convert that to momentary switch closures? This would then feed a GPI set-up to control Tap Tempo on a DDL. Perhaps someone has a different approach and work-around.

[Sheldon Radford]

Hi Don,

I'm not aware of any off-the-shelf devices that do this, although one could surely be custom made. There may be another approach though, depending on what the needs are...

In the latest version of software it's now possible to store and recall the global tempo with a snapshot. If the tempos are known for each song it's quite easy to create snapshots that set the tempo of each song (and far easier than managing the individual delay plug-in settings). The one case where this could be tricky is if the click tempo fluctuates throughout the song.

Sheldon

[Don G]

Thanks Sheldon for the reply. It would certainly be nice if tempos never changed from a comfort point of view, but on songs that are tempo mapped, or perhaps when the band may wish to change the tempo in the course of the song the global tempo just won't work.

It would be great if the GPI's (or perhaps a selected one) could incorporate a comparator circuit with some logic that could be switched in to take advantage of capturing the real-time tempo of the performance. In the event of a click drop out every now and then, the converted tap-tempo would still fall into a musical delay time and be usable, whereas the global tempo might certainly get in the way and step all over the tempo of the song if it didn't match up.

Next version hardware perhaps or a retrofit or maybe an external box either custom or off-the-shelf?

[sonicboost]

Don - I love that idea!

[emluper]

Much easier to get a MOTU MidiTimePiece from Ebay for less than $100 and do it that way. It accepts a 1/4" input to receive a click and will convert it to MIDI Beat Clock, MTC, whatever. Used to use that for years to get the sequencer to follow the drummer, not the other way around.

[Don G]

Hey there emluper. The Midi Time Piece was a fine device and can certainly be used as a cost effective MTC or Midi Beat clock generator or converter! I have a few of those still from my antiquated Midi racks gathering dust in my garage. Another old timing device that was quite powerful is the Garfield Time Commander which did quite a few addtional timing tricks. The problem though is that the Venue software, while it will accept and slave to MTC or SMPTE (a better choice due to the greater resolution) for snapshot recall will not accept Midi Beat Clock at this time. So we're still back at the beginning of the problem unfortunately. Thanks for the thought.

[amoyer]

Would be nice if in the events you could use the meter input level. This way whenever the signal hit the event threshold it could trigger the tap tempo. Digital consoles shouldn't require an external device to do this. There are lots of external devices that could do this, but why should we have to use an external device? If we think a console can do something, it should be able to do it... right?

[Don G]

Hey there amoyer and thanks for writing in on this thread. I think you sort of have good idea, but I think I would like to clear up a few things about it. The window (shape) of the sound being used as the trigger would need to be carefully moulded so as not to cause any unwanted triggering. That in itself could take a large amount of processing (compression, gating, eq) to acheve a usable piece of audio for this purpose. On top of that The timing of whatever program source you want to use becomes quite important.

Assuming what you suggest can eventually be accomplished or whether it needs to be external as I currently propose for a quick fix doesn't matter, as long as we can trigger it from the stage. Think of what could be accomplished by using a tempo trigger source for so many different effects besides DDL's like panners, phasers etc. If the plug-in companies get on board with this it would be great for creativity.