Hi everybody, I play in a band influenced by prog rock and, sometimes, we play quite complex structures. Using Ardour to record us, we found that we can set the metronome in order to play strange times (for example 7/16).
In order to do that, we change the tempo in the needed bar and than rechange the tempo to return at the normal one (or change it again) on the next bar.
But if we set a chorus (for example, I invent a 4 bars chorus: 3/4, 7/8, 4/4, 4/4), can I repeat the entire chorus automatically without set every single bar on every chorus?
While Prog Rock is not my forte, I believe the short answer to your question is no. You would have to manually set each bar. But I look forward to being told I am wrong.
Hi grouchopower – have you considered simply recording the click to its own track? Just set the input of any track to ‘Click out’ (it’s under ‘Ardour Misc’). Afterwards, you don’t even have to use the click track.
If you still want to be able to keep track of how many measures have passed on the timeline, you could also add up all the beats in your chorus (from your example of 3/4, 7/8, 4/4, 4/4, we can represent it as 6/8, 7/8, 8/8 and 8/8, and get a very large measure of 31/8), then set Ardour’s click track to 31/8 during your choruses. Then you can just use Location Markers to mark whenever that happens.
Let me add to that: After you record the click track, you can then copy the audio and paste it at the next chorus. If you set the timeline to 31/8 during the choruses, it should be easy to line up the first beat of the pasted region to the first beat of the chorus.