Drum timing issue: off-mark (starts before the bar)

[bvstudios]

I have a problem that I haven't seen discussed yet, and hope that someone can point me in the right direction....

I am writing a fairly simple, orchestrated arrangement to an old Irish folk song, and on the third "verse", I bring in the drummer (the proposed orchestra uses a trap set rather than full percussion). However, when I put the downbeat for the kick drum at the 1st beat of the bar, it plays back about an eighth BEFORE the barline (??)

I went back and manually cleared out every bar before the kick drum entry to no avail (in case of accidental entries). I can't find anything that causes this to happen in the setup, but I fear I have missed something simple, and it's causing me grief!

It's happened before and my usual "fix" has been to delete the staff and start again, but in this case, it didn't help one bit.

Any thoughts? I can probably post the file if someone wants to check it.

UPDATE: Well, it's a workaround, but I'll take it. Here's how I managed to fix my own issue...

The kick is copy/pasted on for the next 21 bars. I used the same bar that was causing me grief as the 'copy', and for the next 21 bars, it was out of time..... UNTIL ... I simply deleted that initial bar. (select the bar, hit DEL key). Suddenly, the remaning bars were in time and playback as written (Go figure that). So I grabbed one of those bars from further on in the score, copy/pasted it back to the initial spot and held my breath.....

It worked.

I don't know why it worked, but it did... So I can continue for now with this piece, but I am still very interested in any thoughts about what may have caused the issue in the first place...?

[bvstudios]

Bumping my own thread because I've run into it again, and this time the fix I "thought" would do it has left me wanting.... a better fix (it didn't work this time).

I am stumped- I created a new piece, laid out my staves and created a snare drum line (I'm using orchestral precussion, not a drum kit). The snare line plays like it should. Then I added in the bass drum on beat one in each bar.

For some reason, the bass drum sounds somewhere between beats three and four of the pickup measure, and spaces itself out accordingly over the rest of the piece. As a result, it sounds like.... well, I won't say, but I will say that I'm becoming more and more frustrated with it.

What am I doing wrong???

Apparently, I can't upload as a pdf or mus file... Can someone help me upload the sample sheet?

[Peter Thomsen]

…Apparently, I can't upload as a pdf or mus file... Can someone help me upload the sample sheet?

Before you can upload a file to this forum, you must compress the file, e. g. as a zip file.

[bvstudios]

Ahhhh... thank you so much.

Sample attached.

[Peter Thomsen]

When I play back the .mus document you uploaded (= Marcato), I hear the Bass Drum on beat one in each measure.

Since you hear the Bass Drum 1½ beat ahead of Beat One, I suspect that the culprit is located in your computer system, rather than in your .mus document.

[bvstudios]

Uh-oh... that's helpful.. At least I know I'm not totally crazy. Now I have a place to start.

I've turned off the Human playback, set the latency on the sound card as low as possible, even defaulted my sounds to the built-in soft synth, yet the problem persists in this piece, and that's what drives me nuts.

I have 40 or so pieces where it simply is not an issue: the drums (in whatever configuration- orchestral, drum kit, other precussion, etc) all playback exactly as written. But I also have two pieces (this one being the most recent) where nothing I do keeps the various precussion parts in synch on my PC.

I believe that it is something in either my PM set up or my laptop, and you've pretty much confirmed it, but I'll be blowed if I can figure it out!

Thanks for the effort!

[miker]

Try this: set up a copy of the score. Delete half of it, and see if the problem exists. If it doesn't, try the other half. If it does, delete half of of those measures, and so forth. What you are trying to do, is see if there is something in some measure that's causing the problem.