Rayzoon Technologies LLC

[fractalist_5000]

Greetings all - first-time poster / recent new Jamstix user here. I appreciate your patience as I come to a thorough understanding of how Jamstix works and 'thinks'.

I'm loving Jamstix as a tool for creating song demos in the process of composing (prior to submitting my music to a human drummer). I compose mostly in my DAW (Reaper in this case). I have a question as to best workflow in regards to assigning song sections in Jamstix.

TLDR question: Is it possible to break down a longer Jamstix sequence of bars into defined Song Structure elements, while maintaining the drum music already defined in that sequence?

In other words, say I've arrived at a certain length of music (by a combination of Jamstix' own computation with manual programming of hits / bars), and I want to then give it structure, can I do so without losing that work, only adding structure but not modifying the music as such?

Can I take any sequence of bars, and subdivide it into two constituent sections, again while preserving the established drum music?

Most often, I won't know starting out what the structure of a piece will be, and it will evolve as I develop and compose the piece. All that time, I'll be molding the drums as one continuous sequence of bars. At one point it will have matured to where I can apply a structure. At other points in time, I may want to change the structure or break portions into structural elements.

Any advice and best practices regarding the optimal workflow while composing and building pieces from scratch is much appreciated!

Kind regards,
Nic

[Azimuth]

Hi Nic,

Welcome to the forum. There is no way to do that automatically that I can think of. The way I would approach this would be to create a new song part the length you need, copy the bars you want in that part from the original sequence and paste them into the new song part. Repeat this until you have arranged the original sequence how you want it.

EDIT: It would also probably be a good idea to lock all bars in the original sequence before you start copying and pasting them, just to be safe.

[Sir_Plus]

(From the quickstart manual)... maybe you could use:

‘Turn Bar Into Style’ in the bar editor menu
• load the desired drummer model. The part now composes based on your edited groove with accents and fills provided by the drummer. You can also use ‘Add’ or ‘Extract’ in the brain menu to add elements to your groove.
* I think that when you do this, other parts that are linked to that part will then be composed based on that Style.

I honestly have to revisit this. ** Also, I wish that when you hit recompose for a part, there was a revert or undo button. For now, when you hit recompose, you can't just undo it...if you hit recompose repeatedly, it recomposes based on the previous recompose, and you lose the original. So you have to copy the bar FIRST, and then use recompose, and paste back the original to get it back. Sorry if this is tangential, but I think we're basically trying to do the same thing.

[Azimuth]

@Sir_Plus,
It's not exactly what you're wishing for, a true undo function, but I always use the "Save a Restore Point" button so I can at least get back to my original place before I start experimenting. It has saved my a** more than once.

I didn't suggest using Save Groove as Style to the OP because it sounded as if they already had the drum performance arranged as wanted but just wanted to break it into sections without Jamstix changing anything.

[Sir_Plus]

Yes, restore points are good, but I tend to wind up with A LOT of them, and I lose track of what's what. I'm really bad that way! So what I'm trying to do is to form the habit of copying a bar before I hit recompose. This probably isn't exactly what the OP was asking, but it might be handy sometimes anyway.
My thinking in terms of what the OP asks is using Save Style in conjunction with having certain parts linked, but not others. I'm not sure if that helps the OP or not, but maybe the ideas will be helpful anyway in some cases.
* Thanks as always Azimuth! You're THE most helpful person here!

[fractalist_5000]

@Sir_Plus and @Azimuth,

Thanks both for your responses! Since this is not a defined aspect of the Jamstix workflow, I'll experiment with the suggestions you provided.

I suppose this could be a feature request, but I don't know how actively those are being picked up

Cheers!

[Azimuth]

Hi Nic,

Actually I looked into this a bit further and there is a "semi-automatic" way to do what you want I forgot about. If you use "Extract Part" when you right click on the first Bar in the Timeline you want to place into a new Song Part, a window will open asking how many Bars to "extract" for the new Song Part. I think this will work better for what you want than my original suggestion.
I would still suggest locking all Bars in your original sequence before extracting the Song Parts.

[fractalist_5000]

Thank you Azimuth! I tried this quickly and it seems that the extracted part is placed after the original part being extracted from. I extracted 6 bars from the original "Intro" which generated the new part "Intro [1]", which Jamstix placed at the first empty bar after the original (long) part.

It probably is useful for what I want to do, it's just that I need to figure out how to extract and move parts in such a way that I get the original music back, just nicely structured . Probably by extracting all the new parts in order, then discard the original part, reverting the first new part to bar 1. I shall tinker.

Really appreciate the suggestion!
Kind regards,
Nic[/img]

[Azimuth]

Hi Nic,

I figured that would probably be a lot more straightforward than my original suggestion. Also, in case you weren't aware, after you extract all of the Song Parts, you can rename them to whatever you would like. Just double click the Song Part and rename it in the window that opens. HTH

[fractalist_5000]

Got it! Yes, I think this should work.

I guess if I were to formulate a feature request for future updates (one can dream...), it would be for the Extract dialog to have an option to "Extract in place" or the like.

Thanks again for all the help!
Kind regards,
Nic