SEQUENCING 101 - Page 6
MARKING OUT THE BEAT - CONTINUED
Now you can play the full sequence and see how the beat lines up with your marks at every 12 spaces. Here is where you get a little tricky. If you are REALLY lucky, the beat will match up with your marks for the whole song. If that is the case you are done with the beat and you can move on to the effects portion of sequencing.
However, more than likely it will be off every now and then. The key question here is "How far off is it really?" One of two things will happen, either it will line up with your marks for the first 20 seconds or so, then be slightly off, BUT lines back up again. Or, it will line up fine and then be completely off for the rest of the sequence.
If it is the latter of the two, there are two ways to fix this. Either go back and try using spacing of 11 or 13 until it works out or you may have to change the timing grid to 0.04 or 0.03. Nine times out of ten this will fix the problem. Again, you have to ask yourself, how bad is it? As much as I pay attention to detail, I don't get that detailed here. Chances are if your watchful eye can follow it, it can be followed by those that are watching.
Don't worry if there are short part of the song where the beat is is sync with other effects. You can change the marks for these parts so everything lines up.
Now we are on to the effects portion. An "effect" can be defined as any part of the song that is not the beat. It can be a voice, an instrument, a ramp up or a ramp down the musical chart. As an example I will use instruments since I have a reindeer orchestra. First I go to the tapper wizard again. I begin to tap out what I feel are the sax, clarinet or trumpet. I do the entire song and then apply it to the "EFFECT 1" channel.
This is where the highest attention to detail come into play. People will not be paying as much attention to the beat as they will the effects of a song. LOR has a great feature where you can play the song at 1/2 speed to get the lights to come on EXACTLY as the effects occur with the song.