Editing Capo's Beat Grid

Buried in the list of features that we added to Capo 4 was the oft-requested ability to manipulate Capo’s detected beat locations.

Capo’s automatic beat detection is generally pretty good, but here are a few situations that can cause havoc:

• Varying tempo and meter (e.g. The Beatles’ A Taste of Honey)
• Unconventional/changing time signatures (e.g. The Kinks’ Strangers)
• Compound time signatures (e.g. John Mayer’s Another Kind of Green)
• Fluid tempo (e.g. Mississippi John Hurt’s Candyman)

In some cases Capo’s metronome clicks in time with the song, but fails to identify the start of each bar. In other cases Capo seems to go adrift, and the metronome drifts in and out of phase with the song.

In all of these cases, Capo fails to mark the bar locations correctly. That makes it difficult to rely on Capo’s bar/beat location display, and makes the new Chords song view harder to read.

While I do hope to one day have a solution that nails all of the above scenarios automatically, I’m pleased to offer new tools that let you override Capo’s beat grid yourself in Capo’s new Structure song view:

In addition to fixing incorrect beat marks, these new tools give you a way to re-interpret the beat grid in a way that works for you.

For example, some players like to count 8th notes, and others like to count quarter notes. Some want to count the “triplet feel” explicitly, and others are more comfortable counting the half-time pulse. The John Mayer track I called out above is a pretty good example of a song that could be counted a few different ways.

Anyway, I really hope that you find this feature helpful whenever a song demands that you reach for it. Enjoy!