It’s nice to have but will it really make ST4 better on stage?
I don’t believe it will make it a huge difference to us.
Why?
We already have a great way to audio segment our song and jump around it, creating loops is easy on ST3 and very helpful on stage but to a point where if you use too many loops it becomes not practical on stage as the trigger buttons are to small to hit by finger and you don’t see the full naming of loops, using foot control jumping method becomes too awkward as too many loops means spending more time to concentrate to get to the one you really need , so in some case it works against you , not having enough loops means you don’t get good control of jumping around as the end of loop trigger points are not there to jump to another spot, so the sweet spot is having all the song segmented in to a few basic segments , intro, verses, choruses, solos, ending. This gives you less control compared to beat jumping but it actually works really well on stage and gives you enough freedom to rearrange your song , yes it could be a bit better by having all segments having the same size buttons , but if we had beat detection we would be able to jump from the end of the bar to a new destination in the song, this sounds great but in actual fact would not work well for us as we would be taking a chance if the two audio segments will work well together for a transition , it actually might sound like a crappy transition, also we would need extra buttons to push on our remotes because we would need to search for a next audio segment and once found we would need another button to activate the transition which would happen at the end of the now playing bar and x our fingers that the transition will work , from experience of audio editing I can say it probably would sound very average if not bad , so would it be worth it , I would say no.
I prefer to have my audio segmented for perfect transitions and I like the fact I can select a new next segment and then concentrate on the audience knowing the transition will be perfect.
Beat detection should be done in the DAW for easy editing , the player does not really need beat detection it actually works well as is , what it needs are better/bigger buttons to move around the segments no matter how small or large the segments are.
I believe beat detection in ST4 is not going to give me greater improvement on stage , yes it will be nice to have but it won’t improve my on stage experience ,
I believe time based control is better suited for a player only, whats needed much more is an easier way to enter midi data to control external devices, entering synced lyrics, search for next song etc, etc. this is more important than beat recognition.
Sometimes more is less, and not enough is less, a good balance is best. Ok just think carefully about what i said.It does make sense. Ok i am reffering to number of Audio Segments.🤪