I’m constantly struggling in live band settings with the drummer (mostly) setting the right tempo. I’m now becoming reliant on Cantabile to provide the tempo, and I snap my fingers for the drummer, who then counts off the tune.
Would it be possible to have the tempo control section (at least the light) detach from the UX as a separate , floatable window that can be resized? I could then resize it, and could even use a second monitor near the drummer.
Bonus points if the metronome stops blinking after X events. This would make the distraction of a big screen flashing at me (or the drummer or the audience) for entire song less annoying. I suggest events because I could pluck out a couple notes to test volume by setting this value to number above 1, but it could also be mapped to a binding to do it, but I’d probably forget to push the button I assigned, and then the drummer would have a seizure and start playing like Animal from the Muppets - oh, wait, he’ll do that anyway.
I don’t offer a solution to the flashing light. I just wondered if you were setup in a live situation where you could send a click track to the drummer. An audible restraint is hard enough. A light signal is even harder, believe me, I’ve tried. Plus, it is annoying to the players and audience as well.
Regards
Corky
EDIT:
One of the drummers I work with has metronome on his kit that gives him the countoff tempo, and helps regulate tempo during the song.
You could also add a (non-master/none-slave) midi file with a few measures of clicks to every song that can be sent to the drummer’s in-ear, to get them going. The same midi file could be re-used for each song (that uses the same type of beat), while the tempo is determined per song. I do this for some songs in one of the bands I play in. I trigger the file with one of the pads on my keyboard.
No worries. Thanks Brad. For now I’ll do the finger snapping thing.
The audio metronome idea just doesn’t work in this case because of the (already) complicated setup, and the need to avoid having additional dependencies (especially ones that involve drummers, who usually are less techy than keyboardists)
I’ve managed to get my drummer to adopt a Windows tablet running LivePrompter. LP can be configured with an extra-large title bar, which makes the metronome well visible, allowing a drummer to easily get the right tempo for the current song. I script my songs with drum chart builder plus patterns / breaks with MuseScore and display the result as pictures in LivePrompter:
If you don’t want to go through the full preparation effort, the minimum for your drummer could be just a simple text file with a list of the song sections and the tempo information - easy to prepare in any text editor.
I’ve found it easier to de-centralize, so not everybody depends on me and my rig…
