tempo vs ticks/row

[moltres_rider]

what is the difference in tempo vs ticks/row?

it seems you can have a song with a lot of patterns but be very short because the ticks/row is a low number, or a long song with little amount of patterns with a high ticks/row setting.

I got confused when two different modules had the same number of rows in a pattern and same number of patterns, and same tempo but one was significantly longer than the other until I saw one had 1 ticks/row and the other had 8 ticks/row... then I made them both 4 tick/s row and they had similar length.

can you explain this tempo vs tick/row confusion I have? why not just have a temp, why do we also need ticks/row?

[LPChip]

Tick is an invisible number. If you have 1 tick per row, there will be a count to 1 for each row. If you have 8 ticks per row, you have a count to 8 for each row, making that row sound 8 times longer than with 1 ticks per row. Thats all there is to it.

If you'd see every tick, you'd have huge patterns.

Why are there ticks per row? Because certain effects rely on those. Thats why you can do a note delay but also arpeggios use this value to determine how fast the arpeggio is sounding.

Fun fact: If you double both the speed (ticks per row) and the tempo your song will be the same speed, but certain effects will behave differently so your song may sound different if you use these effects.

[Saga Musix]

Ticks are a legacy concept from the early Amiga days.
Someone has made some good work on explaning the differences between the various tempo modes and how the various variables influence the tempo in the manual; there's not much more to be said about the tempo once you have understood that article, so you should read this first.