Best way to do a ritard.

[Marc B]

I've been struggling a bit with finding an efficient way to do a ritard.

I've done it by turning off the click and then playing it in. Although this sounds natural it is tricky and time consuming to sequence many parts to match the first line I've done.

I've also tried sequencing the passage at a steady tempo then editing the tempo to create the ritard. That's tricky too to create a natural ritard by drawing the line. The tap tempo approach works pretty good but regardless of the method the start point and point of each note always have to be tweaked individually because of minute difference of attack and release are magnified at slower tempo.

Thoughts anyone?

[William]

I think you've identified something that is basically difficult to do now matter how you do it - tempo changes that sound natural. Because they have to be done by both the performance and the MIDI timing. I have worked very hard on tempo changes, trying to get them to sound natural, and find that first changing the sequencer tempo, and then re-doing certain lines that sound as if they went into "slow motion" or unnatural often helps. One thing that often occurs is that the tempo change may be more sudden than you might think. For example instead of a perfectly smooth linear change through two measures, there would instead be almost no change in the first measure, then a lot of change in the second. So it could be analyzed in MIDI as a curve, but an irregular one.

A trick I've used that seems to work is to make only a slight gradual change in one bar or number of bars, then start suddenly at the new tempo. So you get the feeling of a change starting, and then the new tempo kicks in. This is similar to a curve.

All of these correspond to live playing, in that players actually don't slow or speed up anywhere near as uniformly as the mathematics of the notation would indicate, but seem often to "pile up" the change at the very end.