Make own Time Signature

Hello,

I want to make more advanced time signatures in ardour. Is there a way to do it on my own?

For example a 15/8 signature: I could do this just 15/8 and the first one is the “higher” click, but what I want is more advanced marking-clicks like 3+3+3+2+2+2.

you could use Hydrogen or something, though yes, it’s

  • limited, because Hydrogen doesn't cater for changes in tempo or time signature, ("something" might?) and
  • painful, because when you change tempo in ardour it doesn't propagate to Hydrogen.

That reminds me (leaving "how do I" territory now, moving into "reluctant feature request") of something I think could -maybe- be solved at jack's level: have a notion of time signature and tempo known to the jack clock, so that sequencers' beats/bars automatically align. The risk here is obviously that when the user decides to change time signature in one program, data in others could start looking a real mess, though it should be "only" in the representation, not in the actual music. All this gets really complicated, though, as information about a session's worth of time/tempo info would have to be updated in each jack client every time tempo/time one jack client application is changed.
something I think could -maybe- be solved at jack’s level: have a notion of time signature and tempo known to the jack clock, so that sequencers’ beats/bars automatically align.

This functionality already exists. It has from the very beginning. If you look closely at the display for qjackctl, it shows what the current tempo and time signature is. However the Hydrogen devs have drug their feet in implementing support for it within Hydrogen.

i knew it: Jack rules.

7 years later, same problem: I’m trying to make a 5/4+6/4+5/4+7/4 song, but I can’t figure out how to make it without placing every single time marker manually.

Is there any way to do that?

I also tried to open the .ardour file, and I found this:

Anybody knows any automated way to copy and paste that text by changing the bar numbers as needed for a big number of bars?

Mmh, looks like the forum doesn’t want to show .ardour file’s code.

Anyway you can try and create a new session with 5/4 on the first bar, 6/4 on the second, 5/4 and 7/4 and look into the .ardour file. It should be something very easy to repeat those four lines by changing just the bar numbers, but I don’t know how to do that.

Anybody could help, please?

I created an account on this forum to announce this: I have a solution. You opt to leave the time signature at 4/4 like the rest of us and program your click track with whatever tool you feel comfortable with. Then import the click track and start playing along to it. Do it the easy way.

I don’t see any reason to inputting time signatures into a DAW – unless you really need to be reminded by a tiny number in the transport bar as to what the time signature will be for the next three seconds :slight_smile:

snap-to-grid can be pretty useful …