How to start a custom? (how to adjust measures/1st beats)

[Billkwando]

I just sorta jumped into custom creation with both feet, and extensive experience authoring customs in another rhythm game (DTXMania).....but I'm still not sure I'm doing it right exactly (though I have been heeding Chilli's sig advice!).

 

When I start a custom, what I've been doing is starting a new project, finding the BMP, and then I'll play the track with metrognome. If the beats don't line up with the clicks I'll take the very first line and move it around until the clicks and the beats sound synced up.

 

Once I do this, I import the GP file, and with grid snap set to 1/8, I'll just slide the whole group of notes around until they line up with where they should be in the audio track. Due to song intros and things like that, this results in the song basically never starting on the first beat of the measure. The song plays fine, but anybody who is musically trained might find playing my customs annoying if they pay attention to that sort of thing. I also imagine it could have a negative effect on DDC.

 

So my question is.....how do I move the measure, or the audio track itself, so that everything lines up right? I don't like adjusting individual measures because it throws the BPM off for the rest of the song, and nearly everything I've worked on stays at a locked tempo and doesn't need adjusting, so the last thing I wanna do is mess with the BPM. I just wanna align everything correctly.

 

I've tried messing with the offset, but it doesn't seem to do what I think it did.

 

Also, is it possible to go back and fix the songs I've already done without jumping through too many hoops?

[raynebc]

If there are tempo changes, clicking and dragging several notes will usually cause notes to go out of grid snap because all notes are moved the same amount in milliseconds and not beats. If you need to re-align an entire imported GP track, it's better to select all of the imported notes (CTRL+A), copy them (CTRL+C), delete them, seek to where the first note should go (use the Pg Up/Dn related seek controls to seek by beat and grid snap) and paste the notes (CTRL+V). The notes will have been moved and will all retain their original positions within each beat.

[MVega]

Keeping in mind I'm still pretty new at this, what I've done is, after I've imported the audio file, first thing I do is add the leading silence (you can also do this to the mp3 before starting the new project), then calculate the BPM.

 

Then I display the waveform, zoom in and move the first beat so that it's positioned exactly where the audio begins. At this point, I save the project -- this brings up a prompt from EOF pointing out that there first beat starts after the beginning of the audio file and asking me if I want to add beats/measures to fill the gap. I say yes, and that's all there is to it. I set the beatmap after that.

 

It would indeed be extremely distracting if the song isn't synced to the first beat of every measure. It might still be possible to fix your CDLCs. I think it's possible to delete beats -- you can delete all the beats before the audio waveform, reposition the first beat, redo your beat map. Then select and copy all the notes, delete them, position the cursor to the first beat and paste. You might need to clean up the the notes a bit, but it shouldn't be too difficult.

[Billkwando]

Thanks guys. I was hoping I could just drag the measure markers somehow since they're the only thing that's off. Bummer, lol.

[raynebc]

You can click and drag beat markers if you want, but that affects all tracks in the project. This won't necessarily be a problem unless in certain circumstances such as if you're importing tablature after you synced the beat markers (the notes in the GP file may have a different number of lead in than what the project has) or importing tab from different files (the tablature between two different files is quite often not synchronized with each other).