well there's that and the other way of counting 6/8 time at faster tempos where each beat is defined as a dotted half note, where at 120bpm you would wind up with 360 8th notes in a minute.  this is where it looks like pro tools comes in handy because you can set a value for the click which appears to be applied throughout the project.  

One thing is for sure - reading notation is open to interpretation.
 
I'm in the dotted quarter camp myself for 6/8 or 12/8.   When counting off a typical shuffle, that's always how I've heard it done and it seems to work. 
 

robert_e_bone
BUT, Sonar's Step Sequencer doesn't know a thing about any beat value (bottom number) than a quarter note, and THAT is why tempo has to get doubled if you want to switch between measures of 3/4 or 4/4, and measures of anything with an eighth note base, like 5/8, 6/8, 9/8.
 
Bob Bone

hey bob, 
 
it's not just sonar's step sequencer - it's sonar's sequencer overall.  i'm going to go back to my simple test again - 6/8 time at 60 bpm.  open prv and insert 2 eighth notes.  copy and paste special those 59 times (for a total of 60 quarter notes) and go to the end of the clip.  check the time and it's one minute.  even though the meter is 6/8 sonar is counting in quarter note resolution for the beat value. so, if you're wanting to count the 6/8 time as a dotted quarter note, you need to multiply the tempo by 1.5, in this case it would be 90bpm.  
now, clear the track and draw in 3 eighth notes and copy and paste those 59 times.  go to the end of the clip and you're at 1:00.  
 
my brain hurts...
;)

tom1
Sharke is saying that if the eighth note is the reference note in 6/8 time (and it should be) and if the BPM is 60, in one minute there should be 60 eighth notes;
 
Sonar's metronome plays 120 eighth notes during this time.
 
I was under the impression this was true in all DAWs

Thanks for clarifying! 
 
But I have a question.
To have the tempo consistent when switching time signatures (in the same piece), wouldn't the BPM (quarter or eighth) have to remain constant?
Otherwise, you'd have to insert half/double time tempo changes each time you change meter.
 
Guess this is open to interpretation as to what is best/correct.   
I've honestly never given the metronome a second thought.
I started with a MMT-8 (hardware sequencer)... and moved to Cakewalk Pro Audio 4.0

Jim Roseberry

tom1Sharke is saying that if the eighth note is the reference note in 6/8 time (and it should be) and if the BPM is 60, in one minute there should be 60 eighth notes; Sonar's metronome plays 120 eighth notes during this time. I was under the impression this was true in all DAWs

Thanks for clarifying!  But I have a question.To have the tempo consistent when switching time signatures (in the same piece), wouldn't the BPM (quarter or eighth) would have to remain constant?Otherwise, you'd have to insert half/double time tempo changes each time you change meter. Guess this is open to interpretation as to what is best/correct.   I've honestly never given the metronome a second thought.I started with a MMT-8 (hardware sequencer)... and moved to Cakewalk Pro Audio 4.0

It would be better if tempo and meter were tied together in the same dialog, so that instead of inserting tempo changes and meter changes as separate events, you instead inserted a unified tempo/meter event in which you could define a change in tempo, meter and time base all in one.

On a related note, another thing Sonar doesn't do right is swing time.  You can set the metronome OK and quantize to 1/8 triplets, but the Staff View is a total mess and writing swing time in Staff View is a nightmare.
 
If you want a quarter to equal 3 eighths and you have a swing pattern of 1/4, 1/8, 1/4, 1/8, etc. I find you have to right click and edit notes in the Staff View at the tick level.  Sonar does not seem to want to do this right.

dmbaer
Consider the problem from the perspective of plug-in developers whose devices have to do tempo-syncing.  Thank goodness everything clock-related in our DAWs is quarter-note based, at least internally.  Can you imagine how difficult it would be if every tempo-sync-capable device had to juggle time signitures in the process?  All the designers would apply their own interpretations and nothing would work consistently, in all probability.

OK, I am pretty ignorant about what a tempo synch device is. If it is an external MIDI controlled unit, then synchronization with a "tempo" sending midi clock or MIDI beat messages at a standard timebase (quarter note) would seem to be a big advantage. A tempo change message could then reset the frequency (decrease the duration) of the MIDI beats, and keep the devices in synch. But it seems that the developers of many of the plugins/synths that offer synchronization to the "beat" intend to produce an output the "pumps" with the musical beat, not the duration of a quarter note. Sonar can clearly extract that groove/beat information from the time signature, or it would not change the metronome accent when the time signature changes. Is that information transferred from the sequencer, or do the synths have to extract it or be programmed to follow it separately?
 
I am more sympathetic to the argument that it is just a pain to have the "tempo" setting in Sonar follow the time signature beat duration, if you are going to allow time signature changes in the same piece. A musician reading an MM=60 at the start of a score that starts as 4/4 probably expects the tempo (measured by the duration of 1 quarter note=2 eighth notes) to stay the same when he encounters a 6/8 measure subsequently. That is certainly easier than trying to re-set his internal groove to the newly recalculated beat, and if the composer wanted a tempo change, he should probably indicate it with another MM or other indication, or just by writing notes of longer duration. The metronome mark or other tempo indication should probably apply to the piece as a whole for simplicity. Sonar does allow insertion of tempo changes, independently of time signature changes, and that gives the optimum in flexibility.
 
Perhaps the best and easiest integrated solution for people who find calculating the tempo for other than quarter note delimited time signatures would be to just add an option to set the note duration that defines the tempo so for example tempo box [160.00] and another box tempo applies to [quarter, eighth etc note]. The interface would be affected, but Sonar would then recalculate the tempo to use a standard quarter note duration internally. I do not expect that to happen, as the same effect can be easily achieved with a pencil and the back of an envelope.
 
 
 
 

Jim Roseberry
 
If you change the BPM counter of the metronome (instead of leaving constant), wouldn't you have to insert tempo changes any time you changed meter (say from 4/4 to 6/8 and back)?

right, but it's not just a tempo change, it's a abstracted tempo change - so you still need to remember what the actual tempo is and what it's set to in the project which is sonar's interpretation of tempo.  

slartabartfast
Perhaps the best and easiest integrated solution for people who find calculating the tempo for other than quarter note delimited time signatures would be to just add an option to set the note duration that defines the tempo so for example tempo box [160.00] and another box tempo applies to [quarter, eighth etc note]. The interface would be affected, but Sonar would then recalculate the tempo to use a standard quarter note duration internally. I do not expect that to happen, as the same effect can be easily achieved with a pencil and the back of an envelope.

 
This is how I have been reading that Pro Tools handles this.  Can anybody out there confirm that?

Konrad from my experience when using notation to write in swing time the meter is 4/4 and the word swing in the score tells the player to interpret the first 8th as 2 8ths in a triplet and the second 8ths in the pair is only 1 of the triplet 8ths. Only if all three triplets in a beat are played are they written as triplets.
 
It is also perfectly acceptable to write swing using 12/8 and set the beat to a dotted quarter.
 
I have seen it done both ways.
 
I agree it would be nice if Sonar allowed us to see and express the tempo in terms of the current time signature, however they would still need to use the quarter note as the midi and express the tempo internally in terms of the quarter note.
 
Also even if they did do this change time delay plugs would still rely on the midi time code if I understand them correctly. So when making changes to a delay for instance we would still need to do the math to convert our time sig and tempo back to quarter in our heads to correctly modify the effect.
 
 

I guess I figured out something for myself, in all of this.
 
For both projects and Step Sequencer, I will construct everything so that I convert everything to double the value - meaning both tempo and meter base.
 
What I mean by this is that since step sequencer cannot deal with eighth-note meter base, I will construct the entire project as if an eigth-note were really a quarter note, and double the tempo throughout the entire project.
 
What that will do for me is allow me to enter all measures with a meter base of a quarter note, but because it will play at twice the speed, it will really be a meter-base of eighth-notes.  In other words, what used to be a quarter note would now be entered as a half-note, and that way all eighth-notes would become quarter notes.
 
In the above construct, what USED to be a single measure of 4/4 would now become two measures of 4/4, with each quarter note being now entered as a half-note, any eighth-notes entered as quarter notes, 16th-notes as 8th-notes, etc.  5/8 would be entered here as 5/4, and due to the  tempo doubling throughout the project, the 5/4 would sound out as the former 5/8 would have, were the tempo not doubled.
 
In this manner, it would eliminate the giant hassle of doubling and subsequent halving of the tempo I used to always have to do, since now it would ALL be done at double-tempo, and only note-value doubling would occur.
 
I have just tried the above approach in sequencing up a Dixie Dregs tune called Night Meets Light, which has a ZILLION meter changes, 4/4, 5/8, 6/8, 7/8 all over the place.
 
Since now I set the tempo to double the real tempo (original is 120, so my new tempo is 240), I never have to go back and adjust the tempo in order to switch between 4/4 and any of the eighth-note meter bases (5/8,6/8,7/8).  This saved me a BUNCH of time, AND everything was quite straight forward in the step sequencing too - I just had to double any note values, which was quite east, since most of the tune's guitar notes are arpeggios of eight-notes.  Since those became quarter notes now, in step sequencer I just create clips of for example 7/4, and leave the number of steps per beat at 1.  Every eight note then is now represented as a quarter note, with 7 per measure, and the sequencing goes very quickly.
 
I hope ANY of the above made sense.  It does to me, even if I cannot explain it.
 
I would, however, trade all of the above for them fixing/adjusting step sequencer to nativel allow an eighth-note meter base.
 
Bob Bone
 

Thanks konrad that's an awesome explanation! Love the king even though i listen to him too little. I'll take a listen.

Thanks!

I was looking for a time calculator for selecting audio per beat in a project, and came across this link, which has a pretty good write-up on BPM and such:
 
http://www.harmoniccycle.com/hc/music-25-MIDI-BPM-PPQ.htm
 
Bob Bone
 

If you plan to work the midi metronome and also the audio metronome and either change between them or use them both at once it is important to do the following below.
 
It is good to check and see how well timed the audio and midi metronomes are. They won't necessarily click exactly at the same time. Often the audio metronome will click slightly ahead of the midi metronome. One test is to turn the audio metronome into audio and examine the peaks and compare them to the grid. They should be very close to that. The midi metronome will feed some sort of click sound and you can record that into audio and compare the two and see if there is any timing differences between the two. The midi metronome can appear late sometimes. It will still be a tight flam in drum speak but as a drummer myself it infuriates me a bit and I prefer them to be smack on with each other.
 
You can also listen to the two clicks (audio and midi) pan them left right and listen for the amount of flam that is going on. Most DAW's will allow a timing change in how the midi system is playing regard to the audio system. (early or same or late) You can try adjusting this until the flam stops and the two clicks become very tight. Remember you have to factor in here the latency of the click sound generator too.
 
You can adjust individual tracks of course ie your midi click track can play early or late but it is good to get the systems aligned first then you can leave your midi tracks set to 0 ms delay or advance and still get rock solid tight timing.