Producer/Duets

Written by DeusExMachina

Producer is pretty fun to play with, especially if there is a track that you want, but that does not exist. Unfortunately, it is very much a work in progress, so there are still some things that are difficult to do, and others that are pretty much impossible. That said, there are many ways to hack Producer to get results that you could not otherwise get. Some are tedious, and take a lot of work. Creating duets using multiple font colours, though, is one of the easier things.

I shall assume for the purposes of this tutorial that you are getting your lyrics into Producer using KTP. First you want to import the .ktp file into kJams. Then select the file in the browser and chose Producer from the Advanced menu.

After you import, the first thing you need to do is add a bit of colour. Producer is very conservative in how many colours is uses out of the limited CD+G colour pallet, so you should have a pretty wide open field in which to play. IF you are using graphics, this can be limited somewhat, but can be made more flexible by proper placement of pictures, and adding extra pallet switches. First, find a place in the CD+G stream timeline after where the Producer creates your pallets, and before any graphics you might add. You will see the pallet in the center of the Inspector window. They are created in a two CD+G block set, load CLUT Lo, and Load CLUT Hi. There are usually only a few colours, since again, kJams is conservative as to the number used. So you need to make some more colours. Click in one of the unused colour boxes in the pallet list in the Inspector for the pallet block. (Unused blocks are black. Be careful, though, since if the CD+G uses a black background, one of the black squares will be that background colour. If you change it and the background changes, just change it back to black or use ⌘Z undo, and select a different pallet block.) Use the OSX colour selector to pick a new colour. (If you want different sweep colours, repeat this procedure on a separate colour box.)

Next, find the first block of text whose colour you want to change. This should be on one of the "story board" screens that show the next full block of lyrics. Select all the text blocks that you want to change, and then drag a connector between the Text colour box in the element level section of the Inspector (bottom left) to the colour in the pallet you want the text to be. (If you chose an alternate sweep colour for your new text, drag a connector between the sweep colour and this new colour in the pallet.) Move to the next story board with text whose colour you wish to change and repeat.

You will have to repeat the editing of the colour pallet for every storyboard block, so it is a good idea to use an easy to find colour in the colour picker. If you add a graphic, remember that you will need to fix you pallet by adding back your colours at the next storyboard. You can make this easier by just copying and pasting the CLUT blocks from the original edited pallet to each new one. Use the up/down arrow keys to advance to the right storyboard, and hit ⌘V to trick the "copy calipers" (Sorry, I have to invent all these new terms here!) into moving to the current block. Expand it to include the two CD+G set, and use ⌘C to copy. Move to the next block where you want to copy your edited pallet, and hit ⌘V to reset the caliper position, and ⌘V again to perform the paste.

Takes about 2-5 minutes to go through a song and change the colours. You can use as many as you want, up to 15 (16 colours in the palette, minus one for the sweep text colour. The standard appears to be blue for males (or part 1) pink for females (or part 2) and green for lyrics that are sung by both parts. I have done one with as many as six.