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Hello all - I am new to Digital Performer - going through the 30 day trial to see if I can make it work for me.

I was attracted to DP's modular approach with Chunks, V-Racks and Songs.

What I'd really like to do is modular composition: creating short musical fragments and then assembling the fragments together into longer pieces.

I've started with two chunks:

• Verse (16 bars, 4/4 120 BPM)
• Chorus (8 bars 4/4 120 BPM)

I've got a song where I've assembled the chunks one after the other:

Verse | Chorus

Here's my problem. The Chorus has a few pickup notes before the downbeat. In the finished song, I'd like the downbeat notes to overlap the last bar of the preceding Verse chunk.

When I put the chunks end to end in the song window, I can't get them to overlap properly so that the Chorus overlaps the Verse by one bar.

What's the best way of doing this?

Well, in essence your Chorus chunk should then be 9 bars, because the first bar will contain the pickup notes. I'm not in front of DP right now, but I recall there's a way to designate the starting location of a chunk so that it overlaps. I'm just way too tired and have to be up too early to go into the studio and fire everything up to find out how. Check the User Guide section on the Song Window.

James Steele wrote:Well, in essence your Chorus chunk should then be 9 bars, because the first bar will contain the pickup notes. I'm not in front of DP right now, but I recall there's a way to designate the starting location of a chunk so that it overlaps. I'm just way too tired and have to be up too early to go into the studio and fire everything up to find out how. Check the User Guide section on the Song Window.

Thanks James!

My chorus chunk is in actual fact 9 bars long including the downbeat.

I've re-read the User Guide's Song Window section and I've figured out two ways of doing it:

1. Set the Verse chunk to Manual End Time. Set the end time to 16/1/000 (one bar before actual end of the chunk). Then, the column at the end of the Verse will be one bar early, and when the Chorus is dragged to the end time of the Verse, it ends up overlapping the Verse
2. In the Verse chunk, put a marker on 16/1/000 (one bar before the end of the chunk). In the song window select Verse and choose Merge Markers. This creates a new column at that measure, and the Chorus chunk can be dragged to that column.

So both of these methods do work, but they both involve editing the Verse chunk, not the Chorus chunk, which seems a bit backwards. I was hoping there was a way of doing it that involves editing the Chorus chunk.

The reason for this is that the Verse could have many different chunks following it, each with different pick-ups.

For instance, if I later decide to drag a pre-chorus chunk between the Verse chunk and the Chorus chunk, and the pre-chorus doesn't have any pick-up notes, I will have to go back into the Verse and change the end-time back to the actual end of the chunk. It seems like there should be some way of editing the chunk that actually has the pick-up notes.

I was hoping it could be done by changing the start time of the Chorus chunk, but it does not seem to have any effect on the chunk's placement in the song window.

mgraham wrote:
[*]In the Verse chunk, put a marker on 16/1/000 (one bar before the end of the chunk). In the song window select Verse and choose Merge Markers. This creates a new column at that measure, and the Chorus chunk can be dragged to that column.[/list]

You can just put that marker in the song directly.

richhickey wrote:

mgraham wrote: You can just put that marker in the song directly.

Oh wow! That's so simple! Thank you!

Michael

mgraham wrote:

richhickey wrote:

mgraham wrote: You can just put that marker in the song directly.

Oh wow! That's so simple! Thank you!

Michael

Thanks, Rich, for the assist. I couldn't remember offhand how it was done. I haven't used the Song Window in quite some time.

Have any of you used the song window to assemble a CD?

richhickey wrote:

mgraham wrote:
[*]In the Verse chunk, put a marker on 16/1/000 (one bar before the end of the chunk). In the song window select Verse and choose Merge Markers. This creates a new column at that measure, and the Chorus chunk can be dragged to that column.[/list]

You can just put that marker in the song directly.

I was aligning chunks in the song window for the first time recently, and couldn't find a way to define a new column without typing location into a window. Is there a way to drop a marker in a song that I'm missing? I poked around at that awhile, and found nothing.

I've played with the Song window for a couple of projects now, and I find that the most reliable way of positioning chunks is to use the "Insert Column..." menu action (which involves typing a measure number into a window).

But if you do so, you never have to worry about Chunk Start Times, Chunk End Times, or Merge Markers.

Here's my workflow:

1. activate the Song (play icon in chunks window)
2. place the first sequence chunk in the song window
3. click on the chunk to select it
4. choose "Copy conductor tracks" from the Song Window mini menu
5. play the song until the next chunk should be inserted. Make a note of the measure number
6. choose "Insert Column..." from the Song Window mini menu. Type in the measure number to create a new column in the Song Window at that measure.
7. drag the next chunk to the new column
8. click on the chunk to select it
9. choose "Copy conductor tracks" from the Song Window mini menu
10. repeat steps 5-9 for the next chunk

It takes me about 20 minutes to do this for a 4 minute song, and there are no keyboard shortcuts for any of these. So it's definitely not as streamlined as it could be.


There are a lot of bugs in the Song Window, but my workflow avoids most of them. In particular, I have learned:

• Copying conductor tracks only works reliably if you do it one chunk at a time
• Using Undo in the Song Window often crashes DP
• Selecting multiple chunks sometimes removes Song Window columns and moves chunks around. Hitting Undo after DP moves your chunks around will probably crash DP

funkyfreddy wrote:Have any of you used the song window to assemble a CD?

Unless it has been addressed, DP has long been terrible at burning CDs.