Audio Feature Request - Master/Minor Vamp Loops

[Pierre Flasse]

Hey all,

I wanted to open up a discussion about a possible feature that would be really useful - I wanted to know the community's thoughts on this.

I am a composer/sound designer working in theatre and a lot of the shows I work on are very musically focused, and quite loop/vamp intensive. One feature that I've found lacking that I think would be really useful, would be to create two separate looping mechanisms: 

- a minor and major vamp/loop marker 

- master vamp pins

- The minor vamp/loop marker would function essentially as the current looping system does

- The master loop would act as a default "cut to this location" marker, upon the next cue.

- Master vamp pins would function as cue points that at any point could function to jump to the master loop location.

How this would function in reality: I have a piece of music where the duration needed before the next cue in the show is variable due to differentiations in actor performances. As a result, sometimes the cue is needed to cut midway through the musical cue, sometimes at the end, and sometimes anywhere inbetween. At the moment if I want to cue at the right location, it will quite often happen in the middle of a bar or phrase. 

If we had "master vamp" pins, I could place them on every beat or end of bar - without it being a "loop", and essentially, whenever the cue was called, at the next pin point, it would jump to the master vamp loop.

What do you think? Any other functionality here?

[sam kusnetz]

Hello Pierre

 I have a piece of music where the duration needed before the next cue in the show is variable due to differentiations in actor performances. As a result, sometimes the cue is needed to cut midway through the musical cue, sometimes at the end, and sometimes anywhere inbetween. At the moment if I want to cue at the right location, it will quite often happen in the middle of a bar or phrase. 

If we had "master vamp" pins, I could place them on every beat or end of bar - without it being a "loop", and essentially, whenever the cue was called, at the next pin point, it would jump to the master vamp loop.

This is already possible!

Step 1: make an Audio cue with your music with a slice marker in your track on every beat or end of bar. Leave the slice count for all these slices set to 1.

Step 2: make duplicate Audio cue with the same music, but adjust the start time of the cue so that the track starts at the point that you want to jump to.

Step 3: Between these two Audio cues, put a Devamp cue with both “stop previous” and “start next” boxes checked.

Whenever you run the Devamp cue, the first Audio cue will continue to play to the end of the slice, then stop and the second Audio cue will instantly start, picking up after the “non-looping vamp” section of your music.

I use this technique a lot and find it invaluable!

Best

Sam

—

Sam Kusnetz (he/him) | Figure 53

s...@figure53.com

[Pierre Flasse]

Hey Sam,

Thanks so much for sharing! I have been aware of this before but I think it runs up against an issue in that the devamp is also a loop marker, and I'm suggesting that it is a separate type of marker - the reason for this is that currently if you want (for example) 8 bars to loop, you need an overarching loopable section that is the duration of the 8 bars. If you start splitting this up into smaller sections that would devamp to the following cue, then you lose the 8 bar vamp.

Unless you've also come across a way of creating that effect?

Thanks again for sharing!

Cheers 

Pierre

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[Andrew Keister]

I think Pierre hits on a good point that, as wonderfully functional as Qlab is, it's can be musically obtuse. Ever since the introduction of timeline groups I have been hopeful that we would get a musical timebase to work with. If Qlab was aware of tempo and meter, so many of the operations that are currently cumbersome to program would become much more intuitive and straightforward. I look at the functionality in some of the game development audio middleware products (Wwise, Fmod...) and dream of having that level of musical awareness in Qlab. I have a few colleagues who are trying to adapt Wwise for live performance on a project that is very heavy on music playback with lots of looping, conditional branching and vertical remixing.  I find there is a lot of overlap between how I build a music heavy playback show in qlab to how I implement music in a game development environment. I see huge benefit to adding some of the 'musically intuitive' features that we take for granted in the game development world into Qlab (exit on beat/bar without having to manually create slice points, looping regions that allow for reverb tails so reverb wraps don't have to be preprinted,  more granular transition rules between cues). To be sure, much of this can currently be accomplished in Qlab, but it can become cumbersome to manage in large or evolving projects (moving every slice point when a tempo is changed for example)

Best,

Andrew

[jamesjen...@gmail.com]

Per the Mic Pool Qlab cookbook, I have been using "dummy" silent .wav files cut to the length of a beat or bar, in order to devamp music.

Having done this for years - my hard drive is full of scattered bits of tiny wav files, which are always a goofy little stumbling block, that pause me while I'm programming (oh heck - I have to stop my work, open up reaper, and render a .wav file at .810 seconds... ) Considering that a musical devamp isn't really the most niche use of music playback software - every time I ask myself: 

"Why don't group cues have a checkbox with a user input labeled "devamp group on bar/beat at x bpm"