@jeffrey: "my should start a beat sooner · and lets remove the prelude beat and space so it just starts immediately". my takes 9.79 with "in" shortened to 1.5 beats, which is 1.10x — her own speed, where at 2.5 it had been stretched 1.84x. So the change costs nothing musically. And the pickup goes. lead drops 1.0 → 0.0, so the synthesised /s/ beat is gone and her real fricative plays 1:1 in the few frames before the downbeat instead: the file's lead-in is 40 ms and the first sound is at 40 ms. The pickup kick goes with it — there is no pickup beat to put it on — and the roll stops drawing a pickup column, so bar 0 is where everything begins. That retires the whole sibilant-synthesis path for this cut. It was built because the slice opens mid-/s/ and the take slammed in; with no pickup beat to fill there is nothing to stretch, and the abruptness it was solving is now just the song starting.