I’ve been struggling with this for a bit, so I thought I’d ask here. I have a music track in 4/4 with drums that needs to switch from one version of the drums to another after a parameter changes value. The idea is that to make the transition smooth between the two versions of the drums, I have 4 different fills that start respectively on beat 1, 2, 3 and 4, so that each fill can be triggered depending on which beat is the closest to the playerhead (which feels more responsive in game than waiting for the next bar to trigger a set fill).
What I’ve tried for now is to have two copies of the drumless track, each having their own drum version in a separate audio track. I’ve put a transition region on the first version with a relative offset that goes into the marker region of the second version. The issue I have is that if I enable quarter note quantization on the transition region, to my knowledge, I cannot choose to have a different transition for each beat of the measure.
Is there a solution that isn’t “create one transition for every beat of the first version that goes into its own marker on every beat of the second version”, where placing the markers right on every beat would take ages?
I’ve tried to make everything clear, but please let me know if something isn’t. I would really appreciate your help on this. Thank you very much!
There are tricks you can use to avoid some of the work, but not all of it.
You’ve currently got one transition region that stretches the full length of your music track. You’re going to need two more of those, each with different quantization: The top transition region should be quantized to the bar, the middle one should be quantized to the half-note, and the lowest one should be quantized to the quarter-note. See, when there are multiple transitions active at the same timeline position, the highest marker is the one that actually gets used - so, by quantizing and ordering the transition regions this way, you’ll ensure the topmost region handles all transitions that occur on the first note of a bar, the middle region will handle all transitions that occur on the third note a bar, and the lowest will handle transitions on the second and fourth notes of a bar.
Now comes the labor-intensive part: We have to differentiate between the second and fourth notes of each bar. You’re going to need to add a transition marker (not a transition region) to the second note of each bar, and drag that marker to a higher position than the lowest of your three transition regions. (It doesn’t matter how much higher the marker is than the transition region as long as it’s at least one row higher, so I recommend dragging it above all three of your transition regions, where there’s plenty of empty space.) Because these markers are higher-priority than the lowest transition region, they’ll take priority over that transition region whenever a transition occurs on the second beat of a bar.
Obviously, manually creating a marker for the second beat of every bar is a lot of work - but you can save some duplication of effort by creating one such transition marker, setting up its transition timeline content (if any), and then copying and pasting it to new locations.
This workflow could be made considerably simpler if we supported quantizing transitions to “the nth beat of each bar.” Should I add you to the list of people interested in that feature?