Been enjoying ST3 for a while now, thanks for all the hard work put into its development! Forgive what appears to be rambling…it takes me a while to get to the point, but I feel more context is better than less. I know ST4 is in beta testing, no new feature requests are being taken, and this one may not even be possible…I’m not sure. But just for fun and to throw it out there in case I’m not the only one who could use this…maybe someday.
I normally use a number of backing tracks for a song, one of them is usually a click track. Generally the use case is myself playing bass or guitar with a singer, but I am configuring the setup for flexibility if other players come and go. When I was using Ableton Live, I had it configured to toggle mutes on various tracks with buttons on my FCB-1010 controller over wireless MIDI using a WiDi Master. I haven’t got to the point of setting that up with ST3 just yet, but I intend to. I can see the case of a drummer needing to use a click track, but since my backing tracks almost always include drums and/or percussion…the only time I personally need a click track is for a count in. When I need the count-in with Ableton, I would start the song with the click track enabled, and mute it once it’s not needed with a footswitch tap. If it’s in the middle of a song, I’d have to pedal dance to toggle it on and off in my ear.
The occasions where I need a count-in are not awfully common but there might be 1-2 occasions in an hour set where all instruments enter in unison and a count-in is necessary to stay tight with the tracks. The thing is, to set up a click track that the audience can’t hear is a good deal more complex for a small gig than just being able to send a stereo mix to a portable PA over bluetooth and be done with it. I need just a few count-ins per show, but now I need an external audio interface with at least 4 channels of output, a headphone amp, in-ear monitors, another wire to tie me down, etc etc etc. I have all that, but this is just to illustrate I think there’s got to be a better way to do this for such a simple task. Ooooh. And I just had an idea that might be easier than my first idea, but I’ll get back to that later.
I was initially looking at Soundbrenner’s in-ear monitors but started looking at their flagship products, the wrist/body worn metronomes. This is interesting. I’m looking through their website and oooooh, you can sync them with your DAW! Now the wheels are turning!
But that’s another few hundred bucks, only their app can interface with the DAW and it seems like another cog in the wheel of complexity. Maybe Stage Traxx gets in on that and is able to sync up with the Soundbrenner metronome at some point, which would be cool, but that’s not what I’m asking for.
I look down at my Apple Watch on my wrist. Hm. That definitely has a haptic engine too. Seems like it wouldn’t be crazy for an app to sync its beat clock with a mobile device like a watch; Soundbrenner already does this, except it needs the phone and app to coordinate the DAW and wearable together. Skip the middleman, could either an iOS or MacOS app (such as Stage Traxx) sync beat clock or MTC to an Apple Watch to turn it into a wearable metronome that pounds the beat into your wrist using the haptic motor? ST3 already sends MTC, and maybe even could do that or send beat clock over BT MIDI? It seems latency could be an issue over BT but apparently Soundbrenner has figured it out, maybe there's a delay compensation happening.
Wearing a watch is FAAAAAR simpler than the simplest of audible click track setups. The Apple Watch won’t be anywhere near as forceful as a dedicated device like a Soundbrenner metronome, but I feel like at least for my use case…when things are otherwise silent and you’re paying attention for it (during a count-in), then it could be acceptable and a much simpler setup-teardown than having an in-ear system just for a few count-ins.
I say metronome, because that is probably the widest use case outside of my own. For me personally, I am not sure I want the metronome all the time, I primarily just want the haptic count-in. So maybe how this manifests is similar to ST3’s metronome, you configure it on/off per-song. If I just want a count-in and not in the entire song, maybe I drop control markers into Lyrics, similar to how other events are triggered and sent. I’d be OK with manually configuring something like a functionality on/off toggle with time stamps in the lyrics view to achieve a count-in; maybe the BPM and number of counts gets set as a parameter to the timestamp, like sending the channel and note of a MIDI command.
Now…this is all in the context of my complete ignorance of the Stage Traxx metronome. This is because the tracks I use are almost never locked to a grid, so it seems like it would be a lot of work to make the ST3 metronome work alongside backing tracks. Maybe there is a way to make the built-in metronome work for me, I’m not sure. But what this does open up in my mind, and the new idea I thought of earlier while writing, is something that could either be another option, or addition to an Apple Watch-synced ST song. Visual cues.
The idea of using a text view to control a lot of things seemed archaic to me at first; but I realize now there’s a lot of flexibility in it. Maybe a visual count-in could be turned on as a song option (not sure if anyone needs/wants that), that triggers before playback. In addition I could drop a timestamp control into the lyrics view to start the visual count-in exactly where I want it; while specifying the BPM and number of counts? This way, it doesn’t require the tracks to be locked to a grid and/or match the internal metronome…it can be “close enough." This approach is a little more complex for the user, but if ST users are used to dropping timecode tags to control events anyway, it probably isn’t so bad. If nothing else, it might be a simpler way to implement while a more elegant approach is developed.
I suppose I could try hacking this approach for now by making the biggest text possible in the lyrics editor and highlight "1-2-3-4" in series by calculating the elapsed subdivision times for the desired BPM and inserting the correct timestamps to highlight the count, in time. Ahh…the flexibility of the text editor! This actually isn’t horrible and I can increase visibility without affecting other text sizes by adding characters to the line... but ideally I’d want like, SUPER HUGE numbers for a count-in. Maybe as big as the entire interface.
Lots of rambling streams of consciousness here, sorry about that! Anyone have any thoughts, ideas or input?