SmartTempo - changes of tempo and time signature.

[andymunro73]

The Weight - by Robbie Robertson and the Band has a beat 'missing' at the end of its four bar chorus. (There are three bars of 4/4 then a bar of 3/4.)
The smart tempo function of Logic misreads it as 4 bars of 4/4. Two at 70bpm then a jump of tempo to about 90bpm then back to the final bar of 70bpm.
See pic.
There aren't many strong transients for Logic to grab onto which is possibly why it's failing here. It does a marvellous job of following the tempo up and down in the rest of the song it just can't grasp that there must be a 3/4 bar at the end of the chorus to accommodate the missing beat. To be fair to Logic, a lot of my musician friends are equally ignorant of this!
I've tried to use the Down Beat Hints and Beat Hints but I can't get rid of the extra beat.
Any thoughts would be very grateful.
Andy 

[markno999]

Andy,

Generally I manually tempo map projects that have many alternating time signatures, not sure how Smart Tempo would be able to pick those meter changes up, it is going to change the tempo to make it work.

Now in this case, fairly simple to fix assuming everything is correct after the bar in question.   Change your bar 31 to 3/4 time signature, then add a 4/4 measure at bar 32.    Now pull down your bar 31 tempo increases equally to the point where the first beat of the next 4 bar measure lines up on bar 32.   That should correct it.

Regards

Edited August 11, 2023 by markno999
typo

[andymunro73]

Just to clarify, do you mean changing from 4/4 to 3/4 in the Global Time Signature Display, or the Signature Display in the Smart Tempo Editor?

Thanks

[markno999]

In the Global Time Signature Display.    Once you have done the overall Smart Tempo Import, finish manually.  

In the enclosed sample I used Smart Tempo to import, and it set the overall tempo in 4/4 as expected.  Then  made manual changes to 4 areas where there were 3/4 time signatures and dragged the tempo to line up the first beat of 4/4 measure following the 3/4 measure.   It is pretty close, took about 10 minutes.   You could probably tighten it up a bit more but it is overall in sync.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/sfy6l6aftl1weih8ncy5f/The-Weight-Tempo-Map-Package.zip?rlkey=i7egqih49e9pog1ffbj43t1bp&dl=0

 

Regards

Edited August 12, 2023 by markno999

[andymunro73]

 

 Thanks for the help. 
Following on from your advice, here's how I did it.

I put in an initial tempo marking of 70bpm just to give Logic a nudge in the right direction. It can sometimes get confused and think it's double time and set the tempo at 140.

Opened the song into Logic using Adapt Tempo.

In the Global Tempo map I added a time signature of 3/4 (at bar 16 i think) then added another at bar 17 to take it back to 4/4 

Then went into the Smart Tempo Editor and zoomed in on the Beat Markers. There was quite a bit a fiddly stuff getting the Down Beat Markers to line up with the audio, as there are some points in the song without any hookable transients on the beat.
Then Apply Changes.

Then Apply Region Tempo To Project Tempo in the Edit pop-up menu.

It's interesting (at least to me) to see in the tempo track just how much they hold back in the a capella section of each chorus, making us 'wait' for the release of the instrumental bit which leads us back to the usual tempo of the verse.

thanks for your help in this. It is much appreciated. 👍

 

[markno999]

Looks good and fantastic to hear you got it down.  If you are going to be adding things now that you have the tempo map done, be sure to change your smart tempo settings from Adapt Tempo to Keep.  Otherwise you move things around your Tempo Map is going to move around.  Have made that mistake a few times:)

 

Regards