☆ BEAT

WORK IN PROGRESS!

The Beat track decides how the beat lines will be handled in-game. By default, you can mostly leave it alone, but in some cases it is useful to know how to edit it, particularly when it comes to songs with odd or shifting time signatures.

The Beat track also determines things like animation speed and Overdrive drain in Rock Band.

1. Downbeat: The thicker line that should be at the start of each measure
2. Up Beat: Every line between the downbeats

The most common time signature in music is 4/4, so that would mean the default of 1 downbeat with 3 upbeats between is fine as is. However, when time signature changes are involved you'll want to edit this to make sure the downbeats actually match the song

As an example, if a song is in 3/4 or 6/8 time signature, you'll want to edit the beat track to look like this:

If there is a time signature change during the song, you can also edit the beat track to account for that. Here is an example where it starts at 4/4, have a measure of 6/4, then goes back to 4/4:

If for whatever reason you regret how fast or slow you've tempomapped something (usually for venue or overdrive purposes), you can half or double the beat notes to effectively double or half the in-game BPM of the song.

Here are examples of how that looks:

Half-time

Double-Time

Magma will refuse to build if it is more than double or less than half, though it will work in-game if you override it. Though why would you at that point?

If you've run into Magma spitting out an error about “the beat track going past the [end] event”, here is how to fix it very easily.

1. Locate the exact spot where the [end] event occurs in the Event track
2. Turn off snap to grid, then snip a few milliseconds of the Beat track right before the [end] event
3. Bam, it should work now!