Pre-Count Bars amount changing

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Dudo01
Posts: 4

Post by Dudo01 »

Hello Community,

in my Synthesia Software the amount of Pre-Count-Bars is depending on the kind of the beat.
If the Beat is 3/4 the software precounts 3 bars, before the song begins to play,
if it's 4/4 it precounts 2 times (or 2 and a half (?) )
and if it's 2/4 then the Pre-Count is set to 4 bars.

Do you know, how I can set the amount of Pre-Count-Bars to a fixed value?

Thxs, best,
Roman
Dudo01
Posts: 4

Post by Dudo01 »

Does this only happen with my version of Synthesia,
or do you have the same behavior and don't know any solution for that?
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jimhenry
Posts: 1899

Post by jimhenry »

Since I prepare the MIDI files I use myself, I almost always put the count-in in the file itself. It would be a little bit of work but you should be able to do that with MIDI files you get elsewhere. I know it seems like overkill for something that seems like Synthesia should be able to do for you. But if you start thinking about things like pickup beats, it actually isn't that easy to arrive at what a proper count-in should be in every case. Plus, I think the expectation of what the count-in should be varies with genre of music. I play traditional blues with a band and our count-in is | 1 - 3 - | 1 2 3 4 | with the 1 2 3 4 shortened as necessary for pickup beats. For what it is worth, it is pretty hard to get human drummers to do the count-in consistently too. :?
Jim Henry
Author of the Miditzer, a free virtual theatre pipe organ
http://www.Miditzer.org/
Dudo01
Posts: 4

Post by Dudo01 »

If I want to practice a piece in 4/4 time, then I would expect a pre-count in 4/4 time one bar or two bars ahead... If I know which pre-count to expect, then I could adjust to it... However, there seems to be no information about which pre-count is used for the song, and so it's not possible to start playing at the right position in concert mode. With a 6/8 beat Synthesia counts with a 2/4 beat at all... And again, without knowing how many bars are pre-counted, it's impossible to prepare for the song's meter and start at the right position... Am I the only Synthesia user with this problem?
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Dudo01 wrote: 07-02-20 5:29 amAnd again, without knowing how many bars are pre-counted, it's impossible to prepare for the song's meter and start at the right position...
This is a (very) long running known-issue in Synthesia. The app does the most naive thing imaginable and simply ticks the metronome for something like 5 seconds at the initial tempo/meter of the first measure in the song. It's a flat "wall-clock" time measurement regardless of anything to do with the composition or selected tempo.

While that's just about the worst possible solution, like Jim mentioned, there are some subtleties involved. The right answer would be to give the user a lot more control. The metronome menu should have several more options, allowing the user to override anything the app got wrong and to choose the count-in beats explicitly.
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