I’m not having any luck getting a 12 bar blues thing working. I have an arpeggiator on the blofeld with some shuffle (track midi A). That works great. Length: 48/48, Scale: 1/4, 3 pages. Since it’s an arpeggiator on hold I’m only hitting the chord on the typical blues chord changes, so 3 pages (3x16/4 = 12 bars). Sounds great.
But a 1/4 scale is way to slow for the drums, so I did fn+YES to make it per track. No matter what value I put in it changed the original midi A track, how long it would play, when it would repeat, etc.
I understood from reading the manual that each track could have it’s own length and scale and wouldn’t affect the others. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Any change I make on the other patterns affects midi A.
Am I missing something or is this sort of thing just not possible?
Turns out I had the M.LEN too low. Because I have to use 1/4x to get 12 bars in, I needed to multiply 48x4 = 192. Now the Midi A is playing through all 12 bars, and track 1 is just playing one bar at 1x.
I’m interested in what you are doing with this setup musically. Are the DT and Blofield mostly emulating drums/organ/traditional blues sounds or something else entirely? Blues and electronic music are vastly different musical areas, so I’m intrigued!
Here’s what I ended up with this morning. I did the arpeggiator on the blofeld, and it’s swung pretty high. But the DT isn’t swung at all. The arp is 12 bars at 1/4. That works only because I need to hit the arp chord only at the beginning of the chord changes. The swing is all on the blofeld. The DT drums are 16/16 at 1x, so just a four bar repeating pattern.
It was an interesting experiment that I was determined to get right, but there isn’t much I can do with it from here because the resolution at 1/4x is too low to do other 12 bar tracks.
I suppose that one way I could get around this is with chaining, that is, three four bar patterns.
Now I’m also wondering if I did all the swing on the DT, if it would affect the blofeld as well.
As a guitarist I’ll mess around with this, but will have to do all that in Logic, which will take about 1/4 the time
Also, in answer to you question about what I’m trying to acheive - I love playing the blues on guitar, and I think it would be cool to do some really high tech blues stuff that still has a groove, and sounds fresh. Technoblues. ZZ Top dipped into that a bit in the 80s with some pulsing synths behind traditional blues, but it never went anywhere from there.
That’s what popped in my head reading what you were working on. My dad and I play together frequently, and results are something somewhat similar. Your clip sounds really good, looking forward to hearing more!
Interesting but isn’t this binary?
I prefer ternary for blues, works well with Elektron sequencer. Guitarist too.
Shuffle? Not sure of the signature, term…
Kick Snare grid :
KxxSxxKxxSxx
Love this groove!
Zz top has a different groove, but same grid apparently.
Love stuff from Tame Impala, and the PF takes me back. Yeah I think I used the term shuffle in my initial post since I was still working on it, but just ended up swinging the arpeggio about 50% and doing simple syncopation on the kick/snare. Definitely not a shuffle.
So if you do 3/4 time, how do you do fit a 12 bar blues progression into 4 pages?
This is just to match tempo with other gear.
Apparently @soulfood use it too and may shime in?
I found / used the same settings with Digitakt / Octatrack / Digitone.
If you do 3/4 time, you use 3 pages (48/64 steps). However for 12 bars, I would go for several patterns chained. I used 3/4 timing in this track to get the shuffle feeling:
