Riffworks feature suggestion: pre/post tail

[streuth]

One problem i have when recording with RW is when I have a small lead in or tail at the end of a riff, the lead in/tail gets chopped off, like a pickup for a lead or vocal part, or say a lead sustain out of the riff.

One way around the intro problem is to set the lead in as another riff. This has several problems one is that it effectively limits how I can move riffs around to try different arrangements, and another problem is I have to wait for an entire riff before recording the one I'm really interested in.

For the tail problem a workaround is to just record into a second riff, but this is only useful if I intend the next riff to be some verison of the current riff. It also means I need two back to back good performances (or more if this occurs over several riffs)

What I would really like is to be able to enable a pre/post tail on any lick. So if I'm recording a vocal and it's has a 1/2 beat pickup riffworks will store that separetly but associate it with the layer and riff I just recording, then when I put that riff into a song the pre/post will get pushed into the surrounding licks. And when exporting a riff the pre and the post part would be seperate .wavs and stored along with the current lick with some naming convention which makes it obvious which layer it's associated with.

I think it's reasonable to make the pre/post tail length fixed at say two measures (instead of adding options for the length), in keeping with the simple nature of the current interface.

Also if I specify a riff as a lead in for my chorus, I would like to be able to specify a length to play as well, i.e. only play the last two bars of the riff when doing the lead in.

[Uobvious]

I still think an easier way around this is to incorperate altawar's "intelliriffer" right into the RiffWorks UI, changing it slightly to be able to drag single layers into a "pool" or "clipboard" then drag said layers into any other riff of choice. This would solve the issue of "tails" by loop-recording withing a riff, dragging the "tail" into the "pool" then dragging it back into the next riff where the "tail" should be. I would be happy to pay for an upgraded version of RiffWorks with this feature!

[cwight]

Streuth, there are various workaround we all use for this problem. The first is to use the songlayer. This effectively gets rid of the problem as it records over the whole song. It also allows the same number of layers as any other riff, and by dragging the cursor you can control when the recording starts so you only have to wait as long as you want. You do have to do it after you are happy with the riff order though, but even so it's a minor process to go through and add riff blends in appropriate places once you have your arrangment fixed.

Re sustaining notes hanging over into another riff. Let's say you end a guitar solo on Riff 1 with an E that you want to sustain over into the next riff, just add that note at the beginning of the Riff2, and adjust levels effects, and info bar to suit. I use this technique a lot and it works well to blend the riffs together.

[streuth]

I agree there are workarounds, but this seems like a pretty fundamental problem. The beauty of RiffWorks is the simplicity of recording sections of a song and then being able to re-arrange, duplicate and mute until you get the song you want. That simplicity needs to take into account the fact that it's very common to have an eight note pickup or slight tail at the end of a riff and then make it almost transparent to it's usage so you don't have to come up with workarounds.

As far as moving riffs around, I think you should be able to directly drag a layer from one riff to another (that's basically what I think Uobvious wants with the Intelliriffer suggestion). That could be used as another workaround, but I think it's real value is as an arrangement tool which allows you to really craft the song the way you want.

With the two previous ideas AND you add another button underneath 'Info' which allows true editing of existing layers then you probably don't even need to export from riffworks into another DAW to complete a song. That also enables cool features like comping tracks (Sonar and Digital Performer call it something like that), which allows you to build a layer from multiple takes, etc. ... :>

[streuth]

Well you have both got me re-thinking this. If you combined

1. being able to directly drag layers from one riff to another AND
2. set the number of measures for the 'lead in' to another riff (including the one you are recording)

Then

Pre: is simple you record your pickup on the lead in riff (and you don't have to wait for the whole riff since you might only set two measures), then drag that lead in layer to any riff (would be helpful to be automatically named so it's obvious which layer it's a lead in for).

Post: just record into the next layer pretty much like both of you said and then drag to which ever riff you want it in.

So I think that works, maybe not as automatic but doesn't feel like a workaround.

That leaves one problem to be solved which is when you drag a layer to a riff with a different number of measures. I think that's solvable by being able to drag to one end or the other (ie the beginning or ending of the dragged to riff) and letting RiffWorks chop off the excess or add in the amount missing. Then like CW said use the Info to get rid of audio you don't want.