Is there a way to do shortened bars in the ruler and then reset to full bars? Or what is the best workaround?

Let's say you're working on a song that is in standard 4/4 with regular bars, but then you want to do an oddly-timed drop or break, like half a bar for a drum fill, or maybe even 1.5 bars for an extended vocal break before the next part comes in (instead of a standard 2 bars). It might be unusual but it can be a creative choice, or sometimes when film scoring a technical neccesity for timing to picture.

Normally when I do this, let's say the break starts at bar 30, and then I want the song to come back in not at your expected bar 32, but rather bar 31|2|1 (I think that would be 31.5 basically right?)

So obviously I can line everything up to start there, but then it just kind of mentally throws everything else off the rest of the song, starting mid-way through bars, the metronome downbeat is offset, and moving regions around and snapping to beats or bars doesn't work quite well. I know of course how to work around this manually but I've always thought how cool it could be to enter a ruler change above - not quite the same as the meter, where you make a bar on the grid shorter (or longer!) if you want, and then that way the drop starts on a normal bar number (downbeat). Hope that makes sense.

Is this possible at all? If not, are there any clever workarounds I might not be thinking about? Thanks!

You can't re-set the bar ruler randomly. You can, however:

- program two (or more) tempo changes in the Tempo List to make one bar exactly the length of your fermata

- change the meter of that bar to 17/16 in the Signature track

- combine the two options