Semicolon <something> semicolon is better than semicolon semicolon

[paulz...@gmail.com]

I just want to share a tip I learned from, I think, Pamela Johnson, that not a lot of people seem to know.

I used to do this in my head cues:

;;;;

Now, I do this:

;-;-;-;

Putting something (dash or star or whatever) between the semicolons makes timing the dance much easier. - just hit the spacebar on beat one of every measure.  DW recognizes "-" as a cue, so you don't have to wait through the dead measures before hitting space again.  You don't even have to look at the head cues while you're doing it!

Give it a try,

Paul Zimmer

[soli...@gmail.com]

Thanks for sharing. That is exactly what I am doing. Except I use *;. Works great with long figures: Chase; *; *; *;. Added bonus: have a "progress indicator". 

Kirill

[wlje...@chartertn.net]

I have been doing this also. In addition to simplifying the timing and providing a progress indicator, this technique also makes it easy to  insert a helper cue near the end of a 4 measure figure without having to repeat the timing process. You can simply replace the place holder with whatever you want to say.

Waylon 

[Bill and Beth Davenport]

I was thinking of adding an optional way of timing the dance where you press the spacebar for each measure of music, rather than for each cue on the cue card. 

With this style of timing it would work whether the cues had "; ; ; ;" or had "; - ; - ; - ;" as DanceWizard would know in both cases that represents 4 measures of music.

Let me know if you would be interested in this? If so I can add it to my list of features to work on...

Bill

[Bill and Beth Davenport]

Let me explain this a bit more so that everyone would understand what this meant... 

Currently when you time a dance a .sct file is created that contains the timing. Each line of that file corresponds to a single cue in the cue card (multiple semicolons with only spaces are part of the same cue).

My proposal here would be to create a new timing file (perhaps called .mtf for measure timing file). Each line of this new file would contain the timing for each measure of music.

Now if you had a cue card with "Wait ; ; Apart Point ; Together Touch" it would time the first cue as two measures and the remaining cues as each one measure. The cue highlighting would work as you expected... If this is a dance you're writing you could also later change that sequence to "Wait ; ; Basketball Turn ; ;" and DanceWizard would correctly understand that each of these two cues each take two measures - and the cue highlighting would work as expected.

I see this as having two benefits...

1) Timing a dance becomes easier as you would only hit the spacebar for each measure (I can't tell you how may times my mind has wandered while waiting for 8 measures to go by for Chase with Double Peek-a-Boo).

2) If you writing new choreography and changing the cues (and the cues you're replacing have different numbers of measures) then DW would be able to automatically highlight the cues as needed depending on the number of measures in the cue

This would be done as an optional checkbox when timing the dance so would only happen if enabled (and there would be a global setting to allow you to change this to be enabled all the time if desired).

This approach could even go so far as generating a .sct file during module export so that if the dance is imported into DanceMaster the cues would still be highlighted at the appropriate times.

Bill

[wlje...@chartertn.net]

One more comment on use of the semicolon <something> semicolon technique: For figures that start in the middle of a measure, I use the "~" symbol to indicate that I need to delay the cue two beats. Of course, you could also use two commas  (or whatever else works for you). 

[paulz...@gmail.com]

Bill,

I'm not sure I exactly follow your description, but it's important that changing 

Wait ; ; Apart Point ; Together Touch

to

Wait ; Stick Out Your Tongue; Apart Point ; Together Touch

would not affect the timing.

Paul

[Gert-Jan Rotscheid]

As long as it's optional. I do use semicolons - I don't use extra spaces or tilda or dashes in between. I do us large print so I can see.  I will say that if I have a long cue that takes, for instance, 5 measures, I do divide it up into 2 groups of semicolons with a space in between.

Susie

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[Bill Davenport]

This would certainly be optional. 

Here's a better example. If DW knows when each measure starts then it can correctly highlight the following sequence (by using the number of semicolons to know how many measures each cue is):

"Diamond Turn ; ; ; ; Telemark Semi ; Maneuver ; Spin Turn ; Box Finish ; "

If you accidently got the order wrong (or you're the choreographer and decide to change the sequence) and then edited the cue sheet to be

"Telemark Semi ; Maneuver ; Spin Turn ; Box Finish ; Diamond Turn ; ; ; ; "

then DW would still be able to correctly highlight that sequence of cues without needing to retime the dance.

Thanks,

Bill

[patricia morley]

I like that

Tricia

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[soli...@gmail.com]

There is one little exception when I use the *; method which is the initial wait. This is how I do it: Wait 2 Measures in Bfly Wall;;  Cucaracha 2x; *;.The reason for that is if you were to write it like this: Wait 2 Measures in Bfly Wall; *; Cucaracha 2x; *; then for timing you would have to hit spacebar before the first measure which is really hard. When I use ;; for the initial wait I wait 1 measure then hit spacebar at the beginning of the second measure and then it is spacebar every measure from that point on. 

Maybe there is a better way of doing this, please feel free to share if you are doing it differently. 

Thanks, 

Kirill Stoimenov

[Stephen Pearson]

Bill 

I believe that would be a very good additional function to aid in the adjustment of choreography and would be very welcome

Stephen

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