Hey folks,
i may as well be blind, but is there a method of having Cantabile send out a midi clock tempo DIFFERENT THAN the song tempo according to metronome etc? E.g., if my song is in 120bpm and I want to send the info via midi channel 3 that it please react at 112bpm pulse, is there such a binding opportunity that i cannot find?
Thanx!
t
You’re not blind 
, there isn’t a means in Cantabile to do that. The only alternative in software I think is to run a separate MIDI clock app at the same time as Cantabile and use bindings to control it via loopMIDI or MIDI yoke. The only free MIDI Clock version I know of is dated but still works, Here is the link to MIDI Clock 1.05
To set it up there is a help file built in to the app that covers the setup procedure for the ini file that goes with the app. I can help if you get in a jam.
Dave
Hi
Could you give an example of what you are trying to achieve as that may help us provide suggestions?
Personally I do not know of any host that allows different tempo, but, for example if you are thinking of different tempo to achieve polymeter then there could be ways of achieving it in Cantabile.
The problem of course is that with your example, 112 and 120 do not have a nice ratio between them, albeit they are both divisible by 4 (28 and 30 respectively), which may provide some options based on meter.
There’s also no way to send MIDI clock “via midi channel 3” as far as I know, since MIDI clock is a system message (applies to all channels), not a channel message.
Dave’s solution will let you send an arbitrary bpm to an external device, but if you mean that you want to send different bpms to different plugins simultaneously within Cantabile, then that’s possible using PluginGuru Unify. It’s a meta-plugin that allows you to load any other plugin(s) within it, and it has its own transport which you can set to any bpm.
Hey guys, thank you so much for your time and effort. Point is this, maybe I m also trying to solve this the wrong way: When I started out with Cantabile, I did not need the songs to have the right tempo, and I just wriggled my way through: I had a sort of click track as the master and applied changes of states via transport bindings.
As always, not really knowing what you do backfires later: So now I got these 24 minutes of progressive rock tracks that are supposed to not only get my keyboard player his notes visible and change of sounds, but also is supposed to steer my Kemper Stage via WIDI (works great!). So far so good, all the Kemper sounds have their own clock going, locked.
But THEN I want to steer my TC Helicon Voice Perform, too, and that automatically detects tempo. So I thought I d want to automate delay throws and reverb effects and that also via transport bindings, midi port and WIDI connection. But in order to make that work, I need the TC to get the tempo right.
Now, if I change the metronome tempo in Cantabile, if I m not mistaken, that will change the timing of the bindings, if they are, damn me, bound to musical time, not real time? Then I d have to reprogram the whole bindings, which would be such an awful lot of work? Or can I simply change musical time to real time in the bindings and get away with that? So that, when the tempo changes (which it doesn, in the songs, sometimes!), the bindings won’t be timed to the wrong moment in the songs? Or is that all wrong?
That s why I thought: What about just leaving the Cantabile tempo untouched and send out the “real” bpm via channel to the TC helicon only?
Did I make the problem clear? Thank you all so much for support!
You probably won’t like this answer, but if it were me, I’d change Cantabile’s tempo and adjust all the bindings, despite the work involved. I say this because although Dave’s solution will work for you, it’ll make your live setup more complex (i.e., more things to go wrong), and there will always be imprecision and risk keeping the two tempos synchronized. For me, if some extra prep can make my live setup simpler, more rock-stable, and easier to troubleshoot, it’s worth it. Just my take.
it d be the sensible solution, yes, i know. i ll look through it to find how much work it actually is…
Not sure whether this might help, but if you have a lot of bindings per song, using math to update their timings rather than a manual playthrough might be faster/easier/more precise. A binding that fires on beat b when the bpm is x should be changed to fire on beat (y/x)*b when the bpm is changed to y. For example, beat 12 of a 120bpm song occurs at the same time as beat (112/120)*12 = 11.2 of a 112bpm song.
I’m here considering beats to start at b=0. In general, the ith dth-note of measure m of a n/d meter song would be beat b = (m-1)*n+(i-1). So the 1st quarter note of measure 4 of a 4/4 meter song is beat (4-1)*4+(1-1)=12 of the song.
With a little spreadsheet, you could compute all the new timings for each song and enter them into Cantabile.
Hi,
Personally, I would chalk it down to experience, and (assuming I am understanding the problem correctly) convert the bindings to music time (bars, beats).
It’s a bit like as an electronic designer most of us probably first implemented delays using “monostables” with time constants all over the place, which is fine until you need to tune the speed…
When you realise what you can do with digital dividers and a master clock, well it’s a revelation.
I appreciate it will be a bit of work, but better in the long run if you need to change tempo again.