Planet C -- The Growing Season

Community Made With Ardour
#1

The Growing Season – Planet C

https://planetcmusic.bandcamp.com/track/the-growing-season

This is the last song of my new album By Nature.
It’s not one of my favorites, it’s merely a bunch of idea’s I had lying around, glued together in one song. I do like the last two minutes though.
But the point with this song is/was that I had immense Ardour time-problems. At some point I wasn’t sure if I would ever finish the project.

This project started some time ago with Ardour 6.x. I think. So it has seen a lot of updates.
It has several tempo changes and altough mainly 4/4 there are some 3/8 measures put in. The midi tracks didn’t cope well with these time-things going on. If a region was moved the notes moved on another time-scale sometimes. I spent a lot of time correcting shifted notes or rerecord parts.
And even the grid was not working well, zoomed out a bit, It wouldn’t snap at the bar but only 1/8 next to it. At some zoom-levels the bars en beat numbers didn’t show at all. Location markers were moving to a wrong place at more than one times. Caused by? I don’t know, one day you opened the project and location markers were 1/8 before where I had placed them.
At some point even the clicktrack clicked in a different tempo than the tempo it was supposed to, a very strange experience. So I had to make a special track with midi-click to keep going.
All in all, I did finish the project and there was even an midi-region-timing-error which I liked and kept.
I am not sure but I felt that these 3/8 measures in the beginning were the cause of trouble.

I would like to hear from other peoples experiences concerning these time/measure-issues in combination with midi-tracks. Are these things of the past (6.x) 7.0 (had a internal time representation rebuild)? Or maybe 8.x has most time-issue solved. Is it safe nowadays to start an Ardour project with challenging timesignatures and tempo changes? :wink:

Mixwise there isn’t much going on:
Drumgizmo-Aasimonster
Very few plugins: ACE-EQ and ACE-Compressor, Dragonfly Reverb and GxChorus, AceFluid.
That’s it.

4 Likes
#2

That’s a nice slice of prog :slight_smile: It flows nicely from one section to the next without anything jarring so I don’t think you need to worry about it being different ideas put together :+1:

What was the guitar signal chain and how did you record it?

There were a lot of problems with earlier versions of Ardour, I forget what and when (which versions of Ardour). I tend not to use midi that much, preferring to record audio, but in part that might have been encouraged by the problems I encountered. Even then, just trying to set up all the tempo and time signature markers could be a nightmare – adding a new time signature could cause havoc with the timeline and markers jumping off five minutes along the ruler. And I use a lot of time changes, changing back-and-forth or every few bars :grinning:

I have a 10 minute piece I finished tracking last December, really must finish mixing it and release it. The session name has 7.3 in it because by that time I recall a lot of the time issues had been ironed out and I was finally able to set up the recording session file with all the time changes without there being any issues. I worked on it with subsequent 7.x versions and the file currently says it was last saved with 8.1.

With those older versions, 6.x and 7.x, when I did use midi when sketching things out, I’d have problems sometimes with all the notes visibly jumping to the right at random when I was editing, well away from where they had been and where they were actually sounding. I could never edit things back to the way they’d been, I think I had to abandon a few session files because of that. I think it might have been exacerbated by starting a file in 6.x and then working on it in a later version – even though there’d been bug fixes I think the issues carried forward from older session files, that was the impression I got when I asked about problems here on the forums.

I’m currently on my fourth piece this year, all done in the latest 8.x version. I’ve hardly done any changes of time signature, e.g. sticking with 11/8 throughout one piece or 17/8 throughout another, but I’ve no worries about frequent changes of time signature. Only yesterday, I mapped out a piece with a few changes over successive bars, no problems. I’m even drum programming within Ardour rather than Hydrogen and using midi a lot for writing/sketching without any of the hassles that there used to be.

This year I’ve been making heavy use of tempo mapping. There are one or two minor gremlins with that but nothing major, though I think things have improved a bit since earlier this year as it seems a bit more stable to use. One of those minor issues for instance that still crops up, I nearly always work with odd time signatures in /8 and dragging barlines will, on every other bar, put the tempo marker on the first beat after the barline instead of on it – it’s like it expects all quavers to be in pairs, as they would be working in /4 time signatures.

Tl;dr
Version 8.x is orders of magnitude improved from 6.9 and the 7.x series, especially for all the time signature changes that prog demands, working with midi and tempo mapping is brilliant. Many, many thanks to all the devs and bug reporters for the improvements :sparkling_heart:

#3

Thanks Lost_Highway for the extensive reaction.
A lot of recognition for me in what you describe using odd time signatures.
And yes since 7.x to Ardour 8.6 there is improvement on time. Strange things happen still
but not out of control as it used to be.

I have experienced this several times too. Saved and closed and reopened the project and the notes were on the right spot again. And I must say that unintentionally switch Edit mode to Ripple can create strange behaviour as well (strange in the sense that you are unaware of Ripple). I’ve done that a few times.

Guitar → Digitech RP500 with amp simulator → Steinberg USB Audio device → Ardour.
I do like the sounds of my RP500. A lot better than whatever I can achieve with software plugins. Mixing tools like eq, compress and reverb are the only effects I use afterwards on the recorded guitarparts (sometimes a little chorus, not as a soundeffect but to achieve stereowidth).

Is this prog or are you influenced by east european music/klezmer folksongs? :slight_smile:

#4

When I had this problem, once the midi notes went weird there was no way back – they’d still be messed up the next time you opened the session, even if I’d closed it without saving. I’m glad those days are long gone :smiley: Fingers crossed, I’ve not encountered any strangeness with time signature changes in 8.6…

Oh, it’s prog. That’s why I used to have so many problems because I was changing time signature every bar or two :laughing: