Muting metronome selectively

Hello all,

TL;DR:
I would like to be able to save the audio level or “mute” option of the metronome per state or per song. I can’t find how to do this, does anyone have a clue?

Long version:
I want to incorporate some more backing tracks into my setup and while I considered simply moving to Ableton, for this band I’m too invested in my current sound/keyboard configuration. So I figured Cantabile should be able to do this too, right?

My specific problem right now is that I have theater show where a bunch of songs just need a regular click (Cantabile metronome is fine) while some others need a full backing track and in some cases a click track with counts and tempo changes. I can obviously create a click track for every song and disable the metronome completely but that seems a crapload of work for two songs that need the tempo change.
It would be much easier if I could enable/disable metronome sounds per state or per song, but it doesn’t seem to be an option to hook it up to song state.

In Performer you can create a binding that mutes or enables sound for the metronome. Add it to those two songs you want to mute.

The binding I used was, “Song | On Load | Metronome | Sounds On/Off | Off”.

Hope that helps.

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Thanks! I honestly haven’t attempted it yet but it seems to me like that would just turn my metronome off, right? And I would have to add the opposite “metronome on” binding to every other song? It’s doable but I’d rather have a solution where I can leave everything else as is and just adapt these songs. Maybe there is an “on song stop/end” binding too, I’ll check. Thanks for pointing me in this direction!

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In search of flexibility around a click I’ve settled on using https://www.fullbucket.de/music/bucketpops.html in a rack. I create a simple 1234 click pattern (with an emphasis on the 1). I just drop it into a song if I need a click (not all do).

That plug-in also lets you easily tweak the drum sounds used for the click - I spent some time with our drummer getting this just right for him. There’s also one song we do with some 2/4 bars - in that case I just removed the emphasis (and it doesn’t matter that the bar alignment was wrong).

I can conform you can start a song playing in the song onload binding if you need to.

John

Hey all,

Just to update; John, thank you for the suggestion and I’ll keep it in mind for other cases - it doesn’t really help me with this specific issue though, as I’m almost always happy just using Cantabile’s click and I could modify the sounds there too. My problem is I almost always want to just use that, but occasionally (and perhaps increasingly) I want to substitute it for a track-long click that may have tempo switches or time signature switches or just has “count in” phrases included.

Turns out it’s doable, I started with Tweaker’s suggestion of creating a binding to disable metronome sounds in a specific song on song load. Worked great, I was worried I would then have to re-enable the metronome for the other songs, basically reversing my problem. But it turns out there is also a song “on unload” option, so I just used that to turn the metronome back on whenever I exit the song.

That way I can use Cantabile’s click whenever I want to, but turn it off for every song I want. Thanks everyone for the suggestions and for pointing me the right direction!

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