One of the bands I work with uses a 12 bar click track with the BPM programmed for each song. The click is operated from a foot pedal by the drummer, the pedal is connected to my Kurzweil which then sends a midi controller message to SetList maker which then starts and stops the click on the pedal press. It works well, although the SetList maker midi receive can be a bit temperamental, but once running is okay. The beauty of this is that the drummer can start and stop the click at will and we are all locked into the same set list.
I’m going to be using GP live and rather than maintain two different set lists I would like to replicate the above setup in GP. MainStage has a metronome facility (not really that great) and the ability to playback audio files (a pain to create an audio file for each BPM setting).
I own NI Battery, Arturia Spark and the Superior Drummer and EZ Drummer software but it all seems a bit of an overkill to load up an instance of these on each rack just to operate a click.
So after that long winded preamble my question is, does anyone know of a lightweight plugin that can accomplish the task of providing a click and will respond to midi messages. Alternatively are any of you using a click on stage and how have you achieved this using a host program. The solution should be relatively simple to use from the drummers point of view. He is a typical tub thumper with a low tolerance of tech.
Forgot to add, the reason we use a 12 bar click is that the drummer sometimes is not able to switch off the click via the pedal as his feet are a little busy. The 12 bar option seemed to be the best compromise for setting the song tempo then auto stopping.
This is something that will be coming to GP, just not sure when.
I’ve had to address this issue myself in the short term. There are several songs in our set where we’re using short loops that come and go and the band needs to be able to keep track of beats when the loops are not there. What I did for now was create loops of the same length but with clicks on them and I run the click track and the loop tracks simultaneously in different groups of a Kontakt instrument. That way, I’m able to turn the volume on/off for each loop while leaving the “tracks” running and the click loop is sent out to a different audio channel that goes to all band members but not to FOH