Hi Peter. Today I had a very rare live band rehearsal and three of us were using (my) connected iPads. I’ve only done this with other software on a laptop before but wanted to use ST3 if possible.
Firstly, because the band was playing all live and at varying tempos, what I did was create multiple copies of a blank MP3 of about 3 and a half minutes length, named them with the 30 appropriate titles and made sure all the lyrics were embedded. It turned out that each song was closer to 2 minutes long(!) so I had to change the default scroll speed dramatically for each song as we were playing them. I could see that both of the other guys were losing their places because the lyrics weren’t coming up fast enough, but I seemed to remember that although this was a problem in ST2 - the changes not being transmitted while the track was playing - I thought this was changed for ST3. Am I right?
Secondly, because of the different tempos even within a song(!) I wondered if it’s possible to use a Bluetooth pedal to start and scroll the lyrics ad hoc, maybe speed up and slow down, or pause? I have an iRig Blueboard.
Two things, network sessions and scrolling.
JonathanS Hi Jonathan, I use an AirTurn stomp 6 with all my backing tracks to vary the speed of playback by foot pedal and it works fantastically, so I see no reason why you should be able to achieve your goal to speed up your display or slow it down to suit your live performance, in actual fact if I still had my live band I would do exactly what you have done.
Regarding your syncing problem that’s something Peter will probably be able to help you with but I remember ST2 had this issue and he did get it working but I haven’t tested it on ST3 as I am mainly running solo these days.
Good luck it’s great to see ST3 used in so many different ways to achieve a positive result on stage.
Cheers Damir
First, in version 3 you no longer need empty mp3 files. Please use lyrics only songs and set the duration accordingly. Then automatic scrolling will work.
Big changes to playback speed can lead to jumping scrolling on the clients as the clients try to guess the playback progress and resync every 5 seconds. So you might be a bit off between these sync operations. Try to stay with small speed changes when working with network clients.
Scrolling with the pedal will only work on the host. These commands are not submitted to the clients. Each client can have a different screen and font size so the only option that really works for all devices is to use timestamped lyrics.
peter yes of course! You have already created an easy way to do this, just create a text file put in a duration and presto you are done.
Question.
Without any extra fiddling can you now use the foot pedal speed controls to manipulate the speed to fine tune your live performance as it might drag on or speed up as you perform?
I know you have a time setup just like a normal song without audio but can you manipulate the speed by remote like a normal stereo file, if this is the case than its perfect.
As things stand I adjusted each track’s scrolling speed on the fly as we performed each song, and having done this once I trust I will be able to ‘broadcast’ this in future, while hoping the band is approximately running songs at the same tempo each time. On the day we just disconnected the iPads and each person scrolled their lyrics by hand without playing the empty track.
I need to do some homework re lyrics only songs, I didn’t know this was possible.
Peter, are you saying that as I change the scroll speed it is adjusted in (5 second interval) real time on a second iPad?
Many thanks.
- Edited
JonathanS I think what Peter is saying the scrolling speed is sent to your slave devices once as you choose the now to play song after that the slaves do not respond to speed changes even though the host still does respond to any changes.
So it means it’s perfect if you are running on one iPad but lacks on the run live control On slaves, they will not respond, and if you have changed the scroll speed on a song the next time you play that song all your devices will respond to this new change ok.
I hope I got that correct.
But that’s my understanding of it.
Damir got it mostly right. Only one detail: the host will send the current playback position every 5 seconds to each client. So if you make minor speed corrections during playback and don't highlight each word, your clients might not even notice the difference because the playback position is corrected every 5 seconds and will only be off by .5 seconds if you speed up or slow down by 10%.
peter This sounds excellent if I’ve understood it correctly.
So if I have a track on my device set to default 1.00 scroll speed, press Play, then realise the scroll speed is wrong, I can increase the scroll speed and it will echo this on the second device, and that person may not even realise there was a problem?
No, I'm not talking about scroll speed. I am talking about song speed. Scroll speed is only sent to the client when you load the song. And it is not updated during playback. This is necessary to allow each client to tweak the scroll speed to fit their display and font size.
peter ok just to break it down, scroll speed is when you control the speed of scroll when you do not have any timecodes entered it just looks at the length of your song and averages the scroll timeing to finish as your song is ending, this has an issue if you have long solos your lyrics might get out of whack.
Song speed on the other hand is the actual speed or you could say tempo of the song which does not change in pitch but can speed up or slow down your song, this is where i get confused, can you control both of these things by foot pedal and what happens to the slaves that are trying to follow the host in this mode .
If i have two slaves following my ipad and i decide to speed up the song , what will happen to the slaves screens will they update every 5 seconds or will nothing change and they get out of sync?
I understand the first example will trigger the scroll speed innitially and from there on it wont update , this is how i thought it was in the first place, but you are talking about Song speed which is another totally different thing.
So we really have to be careful when talking about scroll speeds.
Perhaps a new terminology is needed to easily distinguish the two.
Perhaps Song scroll speed should be called TEMPO, and simple text scrolling should be called SCROLL SPEED.
This way the two can be easily distinguishable even though the TEMPO speed is not related to real tempo speed it would just be easier to understand or i should say distinguish between the two operations.
You got it. When you change tempo, the clients will catch up every 5 seconds. Timecoded lyrics will stay in sync although there can be minor deviations within the 5 seconds between the sync messages.
peter Got it thanks.