Operating KTPlayer in performance
Operating KTPlayer in a show comes down to one action: pressing Go to move through the cuelist. Everything else (the structure, the tempos, the trigger points) is set in advance.
The operator's job is to trigger key cues (starts of songs, exits of vamps, etc) so KTPlayer lines up with the live musicians.
Who operates KTPlayer?
Most shows are built to be operated by the conductor or keyboard/conductor (for example Dear Evan Hansen, & Juliet), and in some cases the drum or percussion chair (Pretty Woman), as in their original Broadway productions and often notated throughout their scores. It doesn't take a dedicated musician to operate, but you could assign one.
Parent and child cues
Parent cues are the show's manual trigger points: every place the operator presses Go during the performance, cueing into songs, cueing out of vamps, and so on. They carry a Cue number in the first column, are usually colored, and form the spine of the cuelist. Performing the show means moving through the parent cues in order.
Child cues are pickup and checkpoint points inside a song. They sit indented under their parent cue and are usually gray, useful in tech rehearsals and as emergency pickups in performance.
After a Go
The After a GO, the playhead setting in Preferences → Behavior decides what happens once a cue is triggered: Advance with playback (step through child cues) or skip straight to the next parent cue. The default is Advance with playback, which lets you drop onto the nearest pickup point quickly if something goes wrong.
Selected vs active
At any moment one cue is selected (the next one ready to fire), and at most one cue is active, the one currently playing.
- The active cue is the one currently playing, shown in the active-cue title at the top of the window.
- The selected cue has a thick colored border with diagonal lines through it. It's what the next Go will fire. Which cue becomes selected after a Go depends on the After a GO, the playhead setting above.
Press Go and the selected cue becomes active; the next cue in line (parent or child, per your behavior setting) becomes the new selected cue, ready for the next Go.
Firing out of order
You can fire cues out of sequence without stopping playback. Navigate the cuelist so the selected cue to where you want, then press Go.
Quantise and timing
When playback is already active, Quantisation allows you to trigger Go at any point, and KTPlayer won't advance until the end of the bar.
It's on by default (Quantize GO to next bar in Preferences → Behavior), and that's usually what you want: you can cue out of a vamp anywhere in the measure before, and the cue still moves cleanly onto the beat.
Without quantisation, Go fires the instant you press it, with no regard for place the measure. That means hitting Go exactly on the downbeat yourself, which is hard to do reliably.
Quantisation needs playback
Quantisation only applies while something is playing. With nothing playing, Go fires immediately.
Quantisation can also be turned on or off per cue in edit view. See How to change whether a cue is quantised.
Summary for the operator
- The cuelist is fixed, and the same every night.
- The active cue is what's playing. The selected cue is what's coming next.
- Go command is meant for manual cues: starting songs, coming out of vamps.
- Stop and the navigation keys (up/down) are for rehearsals, or for recovering from a problem in performance.
- In performance, your job is to press Go at the right moment so the fixed playback lines up with the show.