Pickup Beats - Newbie Warming

[Jed]

Hi Guys,

I'm struggling through my first evening with DP6 (brand new to DP all together) . . .

I'm trying to figure out how to track a 4 bar vamp with pickup beats. Ideally the measure count would show the pickup beats before the 1st bar. Or do I need to learn to count my measures with an offset from the bar with the pickup beats? Such that the pickup beats occur in the 1st measure and the vamp proper occurs over bars (2, 3, 4 & 5) and repeats from there with vamp 4-bar sections at bar 2, 6, 10, 14, etc? Where in standard notation the vamp would repeat at bars 1, 5, 9, 13, etc. I do realize that I could do a 3.5 bar countoff which would allow the vamp to repeat at bar 5, 9, 13, 17, etc. - but this seems inelegant?

Thanks in advance for your help,

Jed

[FMiguelez]

.

You shouldn't offset anything, otherwise what you see won't be what you get, and it would be an editing nightmare. There's just no reason to do that. For "pick up beats" just use an empty measure before the actual measure 1 beat 1. For instance, if your phrase contains a 2 1/2 beats pick up figure, and the meter is 4/4, you'd start in measure 0, *and* of beat 2. So bar 0 would have one quarter note rest followed by an eight note rest, followed by your first note of the phrase. This is how you'd see it in QS.

You can have as many empty measures before measure 1 in DP as you need.

[Schweats]

I agree with FM…
In the transport there is an downward pointing arrow right next to the time signature. Click on it - in the pop up window
hold and drag to 'Set chunk start time'. I personally start all my sequences at Bar -2|1|000 which allows 1 full bar for any/all patch changes and cc data
to be sent out to any of my synths and then 2 full bars for a count in.

It's covered here , DP 6 manual p. 672

Additionally, what helped me manifest what I wanted rhythmically , (e.g., upbeat figs whether I played the figs in or step'd them in) I learned where every division of every beat landed numerically. This is under 'Time Formats' p.137 … The upside for me was my sense of rhythm escalated to the point
that it helped immensely in doing transcriptions from CDs.

HTH - Schweats

[Jed]

Thanks for the help guys. It makes sense that there had to be a way to do this, . . but I never would have found it without the excellent description. Thanks for the extra detail Schweats. Until the next small emergency . . . .

cheers