Automatic variation changes from audio file time?

Hello all.

I’m currently using GP in about the most basic way possible, playing audio backing tracks for a live band. I’m currently learning how to run my guitar through it as well, and have got to the stage where I can run the backing through the audio player and set up variations to bring guitar effects in and out, the variations being changed via a footswitch.

My question is whether there is a way to automate the variation changes based on the time of the audio files; for example if 1 minute 30 seconds is where the solo starts, something could tell GP to switch from variation 1 to 2.

I’ve read that this is possible with midi files and also with Ableton linked, but wondered if it could be done within GP on audio files. It would be good to do away with the footswitch and have less tap dancing to do on stage. Thanks for any suggestions.

From GP 4.5 you can use GPScript for something like that. Not based on the timing itself, but based on a number of bar/beat.

Thank you for your reply. Here’s hoping the PA version of GP 4.5 will be available soon.

It can be done with GP 4.5 but it requires some subtle hacking in GP Script

Here’s an conceptual example (completely unsupported!) that just prints a few times out as you reach them but of course one can run any GP3 functions.

Throw an MP3 file into one of the tracks on the audio file player to try it.

However, unless you’re comfortable with scripting, this might seem a bit “magical”. Basically what’s happening is that there is a widget tied to the current position of the audio file player. It turns out that that position (always a value between 0.0 and 1.0) represents a fractional length of a song.

There’s another parameter in the audio file player that returns the length of a song as a fraction of 10 hours (which should be long enough for most of us). With that information, it is possible to calculate the current position in seconds.

There is then an array containing the times (in seconds) of interest and a mechanism to detect when you reach one of those times.

This is not a perfect solution but it does demonstrate how GP Script can be leveraged to provide this kind of flexibility

AudioTrigger.gig (29.0 KB)

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