Working with BPM Changes - CANA-Dan/ParEdit GitHub Wiki

BPM Changes are a powerful tool in ParEdit and quite a bit of work has been put into making them painless and easy to manipulate. heres all you can do with them

Click + Drag

Click + Drag allows you to essentially "pull" a beat line to any other location on the highway, and all the beat lines in front and behind the specified BeatLine will calculate recalculate their bpm accordingly.

You can do this by holding left Click in the BPM lane to the right of the highway, then dragging it forwards or back some distance to "pop" the BeatLine off its position. once the beat line is freely moving, you can release left click in the position you want and the bpm change will be placed there, with everything around the BPM change adjusting accordingly.

If you have the Notes Adjust to BPM quick setting toggled on, all the notes will come along for the ride as well, and will shift around to stay correct with the BeatLines.

Move to cursor

Move to cursor is similar to Click + Drag, but its for already placed BPM Changes. there is two ways you can use this feature;

  • If you have a BPM Change selected, you can Ctrl + Click to move it to a new location.
  • You can click on the BPM change widget to open up its attached settings menu. Click Additional Settings, move your cursor to where you want the bpm change to be, and click Move to Cursor.

Time Signature and Swing

Time Signature is a way for music to describe how long a beat is. Usually this is demarked by something like a snare or kick, but it can also be demarked by a ride of cymbal. For example;

  • [Kick, Hi-Hat, Snare, Hi-Hat, Kick, Hi-Hat, Snare, Hi-Hat] would be 4/4 because the kick is every fourth beat.
  • [Snare, Kick, Kick, Snare, Kick, Kick] would be 3/4 because the snare is every third beat.
  • [Ride + Kick, Snare, Kick, Snare, Kick, Snare, Ride + Kick, Snare, Kick, Snare, Kick, Snare] would generally be 6/8, because the ride is every 6 beats

Swing is a bit different from Time signature. It a shifting of tempo for every second quarter beat to be slightly earlier or later than where it would be normally. a lot of jazz music has swing and it enables artist to put more momentum or weight on a note, even though it is the same volume and overall emphasis in the piece. Here's a good example of swing.

Beats and Sub Beats

Beats and sub beats allow you to calculate the the next bpm based on how many sounds you hear. a good marker for how many beats a specific section has is any consistently spaced, reoccurring sound. you can count those up and manually input the BPM. It will follow your time signature, so keep that in mind. an 8/8 time signature will mean 8 sub beats per beat.