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I have a spoken word audio track that I'm putting background music to. I want to have MIDI musical sections play at different tempos as the audio plays and I'm not sure of the best way to do this in DP 8. I think this is similar to film scoring in that I need specific sequences to play at specific hit points.

Here's what I've (unsuccessfully ) tried.

First, I created a song. Next, I created a sequence that contains the audio track and I put locked hit point markers into it. In the song, I merged the audio track markers to get the song columns at the places I want to put the sequences.

I made two sequences with different tempos using the conductor track, one with an accelerando and the other with a ritardando and put them into the song window. When I play the song, the song tempo overrides the sequence tempos.

Is it possible to have sequences with different tempos within a song and have the song play using the different tempos of its member sequences? If so, how?

Or is the song conductor track the only controller of tempos for a song?

Is my only recourse to bounce the MIDI sequences to audio and just stick the soundbites into tracks at the hit points?

**Leigh

At any given point in time, you can have only one conductor track. You can merge the sequences conductor tracks into the song's conductor track, so you can have the different tempos represented in the song, but only if they play one after the other.

Now if you need different tempos to occur at the same time (sounds like you do, the spoken word main tempo, and the varying music tempos for each piece), you first set the song to play back the spoken word sequence correctly.

Then take the music sequences, make sure they play to your liking when played by themselves, and then lock all the tracks inside the music sequences. (Locking tracks makes them resolve events to their absolute time position instead of their relative time.)

Now there's two possibilities:

a) Either simply drop the music sequences in the Song where you want them, and they won't care what the tempo is since the locked tracks will simply play back the events according to absolute time. Now I never tried using locked tracks inside a song, so I'm not sure if locking tracks works inside a song. Can't think of why it wouldn't, but in case it does not, try the following:

b) Make sure the music sequences play to your liking, lock all the tracks inside each one, and then change the conductor track's tempo in each to whatever the spoken word sequence tempo and meter is, let's say 120bpm, 4/4 all the way. You'll see your events jump around, but they'll play back sounding exactly the same as before, just in different relative positions, so the bars and beats will make no sense anymore. Now unlock the tracks (maybe unnecessary, since we're only doing this in case Songs ignore the locks, which may or may not be the case) and put each music sequence in the song where you want it. The Song should be using the spoken word conductor track data at 120bpm, and of course each music sequence at this point should be set to the same 120 bpm as well.

Makes sense? If the simpler a) solution doesn't work, this second one certainly will.

Why not just forget about using the Song Window and do everything within one Sequence. Lock the original dialogue track so that it is locked to absolute position. Then program up your music underneath using tempo changes as needed.

Thank you both!!

I didn't know about track locking and that's what I need!

Back to making music!



**Leigh

I would do it in one sequence, locking the spoken word track. (And other tracks as necessary as you go along.) That works pretty much exactly like you want it to.