OK, this is another thing altogether... outside the realm of MIDI clock sync. I'd imagine the HD recorder is simply playing an audio file (no MIDI information or clock sync). And if in fact you know the exact BPM (and exact means
exact, not even a tenth of a BPM off) then you can simply dial in the BPM in the Virus, or edit the patch to the BPM you need so that it is always ready to go when you switch to that patch. If you use the same sound for different BPM'd tracks, then program two nearly identical patches, one in each BPM and switch to the appropriate patch for the appropriate song.
The whole bpm/sync thing is important to me, as I deal with multiple musicians running live loops, and without us all being exactly in tempo sync, we'd quickly drift after the loops repeated a time or two.
This is really the purpose of MIDI clock sync, which is to match the tempo/BPM of multiple sources or multiple musicians. If the BPM of the Virus is equal to the BPM of the backing tracks, then an arpeggiator will play at the proper
tempo. It has nothing to do with when a phrase actually starts or stops.
> I was trying to find a way to ensure that when I play an arp it would sync dead on the click.
Getting the arp to start at the correct time is a matter of pressing the keys at the proper moment, and that is up to you and you alone... that's where the musicianship comes in. It's no different then playing with a live musician (without a clock) and having anything happen in "sync."
You're either coming in on time or you're not. As far as I know, there's no way to artificially "quantize" your fingers. But as long as you start at the right time and you have exactly matched the BPM, it won't drift out of time.
That said... I imagine you could totally change the situation, and rather than use the hard disk recorder you could play the backing tracks and click track via a MIDI-clocked sequencer, then route your MIDI information through a groove quantizing filter... at that point, why bother playing it manually at all, you could just add the keyboard part to the backing track and it would always play perfectly. ...And that's called "programming yourself out of a gig."
