Questions about the timeline in "songs"

[MonoPoly307]

Hi Guys

I've been reading through the DP10 manual, and am close to making the call to move to DP instead of (or at least concurrently with) Logic Pro in my studio. The flexibility of chunks, and the real-time clips feature launched in DP10 are both very compelling advantages that would really suit my workflow.

I have a couple of questions I'm hoping for some help with...

1. When working at a "song" level, can the timeline be min:sec, rather than bars:beats?
Does a song need to work in musical time at all, or it simply operate in linear time, leaving the individual sequences to have their own beats:bars, time signature, etc?
Related to this... if I DO choose to use beats:bars at a song level, can the sequences within the song follow the song's tempo and time signature map?

2. Again, when working at a "song" level, let's say you have four sequences in the song: A, B, C and D. If you want to add some additional time in between sequences A and B (for example, 10 seconds exactly), is it possible to do that while still leaving the gaps between the subsequent sequences (B and C, C and D) exactly as they are?

Thanks to anyone who is able to clear these points up for me. DP seems to be a significantly different way of working to Logic, but the level of versatility is so great (especially for soundtrack cues), I really want to understand it and hopefully soon go ahead with the cross-grade.

Thanks again!
Mike

[stubbsonic]

The Song Editor is very flexible, but not limitless. I'm not super-experienced with it, but will try to answer what I can.

1. You can have a ruler view with any of Bars:Beats, Real Time (Hours:Min:Secs), or Frames (Hours:Min:Secs:Frame). It's in the mini-menu, check one, two or all three.

The song uses it's own conductor track which supersedes the sequence conductor tracks. You can copy the conductor tracks from the sequences to the Song's conductor track, on a sequence by sequence basis.

2. When adding time, I think the basic workflow is to use "insert column" (from the mini-menu). If you create a column 10 seconds after the current start of B, then shift-click to select all three of B, C, and D-- now drag B to your new column, and the other three will move and preserve their spacing (seems to work that way here).

What DP's song mode won't let you do is multiple tempos/meters at the same time (over-lapping). For that you might want to mix down to stereo audio and have them overlap that way. The song view does a better job of letting you see music out of the context of bars:beats, but the sequences will still have that structure. You can have separate sequences running concurrently-- like sound-effects, music, foley, etc. But again, they will all be controlled by the song's conductor-- so you have to plan for that.

Managing the Song's conductor track can be a little tricky, especially if you are wanting to move sequence chunks around.

The GUI for the Song Mode hasn't changed in many a version, and there's not much to it.