I know ST4 is going to be quite different to ST3 in regards to lyric only songs vs multitrack audio songs, etc. but I've run into a slightly uncommon scenario that I hope could be better handled in ST4, than the way I've had to in ST3. It's also possible that there are better workarounds that what I have done, so please do offer them up!
The scenario is this - my band generally runs a full backing track, click, cues etc. for every song. However, we do have one song that for reasons (outlined at end of post), we cannot. The song just starts with a tambourine rhythm, then bass comes in, and eventually the whole band comes in. So what we do is run a click for just 16 bars so that the guitarist who plays the opening tamb part can get a tempo and lock onto it, then bass comes in, and at some stage the click just runs out before the whole band comes in by which stage we have a good lock on the tempo.
Now, problem with running this as a multitrack audio song is that the wave file for the 16 bar intro click is 24 seconds long. So, we start the song and 24 seconds later the song 'ends', next song loads, next lyric sheet loads and we haven't even hit Verse 1 of the song... this is not good.
Simplest workaround, which I've employed, is to simply extend the length of my click track backing track, with blank audio, for the approx. song length (assuming we're not wildly off tempo and the tamb player doesn't take 10 bars to come in after the click start 🙂 ).
It would have been nice if I had simply been able to override the song length (i.e. not the 24 sec inherited from the click track) to achieve the same result.
In the future, I will also be adding time-stamping to the lyric sheet (which given we're not on a click will only be sectional time-stamping and fairly approximate) to get line highlighting, so I'm going to have to have some way to extend the song length anyway, be it the way I already have done, or some future capability in ST4.
So, aside from remedying the why behind why I cannot run this some on a full-length click (which is due to a guitarist who can barely play in time doing lead vocals on this one particular song, which also has a number of full band stops in the song), are there any other suggestions on ways I could handle this situation in ST3 other than what I have done (i.e. extend the intro click to approx. full song length)?