Guide / Tempo changes and time signatures

Tempo changes and time signatures

The thin top row of the ruler holds the song's tempo and time signature, and every change along the way. A faint line traces the tempo across the song, rising where it speeds up; a glide shows as a slope.

• Add a tempo change: double-click the top row, or right-click the ruler and choose Tempo change here (a jump) or Tempo glide to here (the tempo slides there from the change before, evenly over time, for a ritardando or a build that speeds up).
• Breathe (Song menu): the tempo eases back into the end of every 4-bar phrase (or 8, deeper) and picks up again on the next downbeat, as a pianist playing rubato does, with a longer slow-down into the last one. It writes ordinary tempo glides over the loop (the whole song when the loop is off), so live playback and every export follow it, and you can drag or delete them like any other. One Undo step takes it out. It won't write over a glide already in that stretch.
• Speed up into the drop (right-click a clip: Speed up the end; or Arrange a beat; or right-click the ruler on the loop: Speed up into here…): the tempo rises over the last part of a block and snaps back on the drop. See Arranging a beat.
• Edit one: click its flag. Type the BPM (40 to 240, to 0.01), tick Glide from the tempo before to make it a glide, or Remove it. Click the first flag to change the song's starting tempo (the same as TEMPO in the header).
• Move one: drag its flag along the row. It snaps to the grid (Shift for none).
• Time signatures: right-click the ruler and choose Time signature change here, or click the time signature at the start of the row for the song's own. Pick the beats per measure (1 to 16) and the beat (2, 4, 8 or 16): 3/4, 6/8, 7/8, 5/4 and so on. A change lands on the nearest measure line, and dragging its flag keeps it on measure lines.

What changes and what doesn't:

• The ruler counts measures in their time signature, and the grid, the bar lines in the lanes and the BAR.BEAT.TICK readout follow it. The metronome clicks each beat of the measure, accented on beat 1, and the count-in is one measure of the song's time signature.
• Clips, notes, the loop and markers stay where they are in the music when the tempo changes: they keep their place in beats, and their time in seconds moves. Timecode, the video, and the time readouts follow the tempo.
• Audio clips that follow the tempo (stretched to it) play at the tempo where they start. Audio clips that don't play at their own speed, so their length in bars follows the tempo there.
• Exports, stems, freezing and every game export follow the tempo map to the sample, and so does playback, the loop included (a loop that crosses a change goes back to the tempo at its In each time round).
• Inserting and deleting bars moves the changes after them (deleting bars deletes the changes in them). Every change is one Undo step.