Hi all, and first of all sorry to ask what I’m sure has been asked before. After several days of scouring, I didn’t find an answer that made sense to me - again, am really new at this! Only got an OT about a week ago.
My question is: can I have different BPMs on different tracks that play simultaneously? I understand - I think - BPM per pattern; but patterns affect all 8 tracks at once, right? So I can’t have T1 on Pat 1 and T2 on Pat 2.
I’ve seen content that comes tantalizingly close to answering this or suggests to me that it’s possible, but am I just not understanding?
For clarification, I want track 1-4 at a certain tempo, and track 4-8 at a slower tempo that I can gradually bring in via crossfading scene (creating polyrhythms thereby).
You can playback loops freely with Loop ON, one shot or 1st trig condition, manual trigger of loops with trigs 9-16.
Use pitch, or timestretch (assign RATE in TSTR mode to scenes).
An lfo on start or slices can be interesting too.
unfortunately, the elektron clock can only run at one speed, so sezare is suggesting that by using a freeplaying loop recorded at a different bpm than the clock speed, you can effectively have 2 bpms running together but it’s not 2 sequences running at separate bpms, it is at best one programmed sequence and then on another track, a long, free-looping one-shot sampled at a different tempo but triggered in time with the pattern bpm.
other suggestions were to get creative within the context of the machine’s limitations so pitch, timestretch, and lfo can be used with certain math to create some calculated tempo discrepancy in sequences, however the clock will still be running at project or pattern tempo thus there is only one bpm, anything else will require a bit of creativity and fenagling to accomplish.
not sure if that helps but hopefully it answers your question.
Yeah, no worries. I think that the OT probably has more tricks up it’s sleeve than any other elektron machine so there are certainly going to be more workarounds in the box you’re using now than in any other. Whether or not I can fully comprehend every option with the OT is a different story, but I’m sure someone here will have further suggestions to get you sorted. Good luck man.
You can divide/mulitply the speed of each track based on the pattern/project BPM . So you could have a 100bpm pattern with one track running 100bpm, another with 50bpm, another with 200 bpm.
(This is the same as clock dividing in modular speak)
But you cannot set arbitrary BPM per track, eg 90bpm on track 1, 123bpm on track 2, 142bpm on track 3 etc.
Without wanting to labour the point too much, the question for me remains why you would want to set different tempi per track? If the goal is strictly-speaking polyrhythm (or polymeter), you would still be working at a singular tempo and could use the solution from @Microtribe above. If the goal is to have musically unrelated “tempi” in order to create sort-of Steve-Reich tape loop style things then I’d say @sezare56 's solution (or even not use the clock at all and just fire off loops using the trig keys without necessarily using the sequencer) would probably be the easiest way to achieve this.
It seems a rather quaint tradition now that you’ve raised the question but as far as I know (which admittedly is limited mostly to Western music) BPM, as understood as the tempo of a piece of music is typically a singular, global thing for all instruments/parts (although this can change throughout the course of a piece) and sub-divisions or multiplications there of are taken care of using meter or even just rhythm (basically what @Microtribe is talking about) - hence why there is typically a single conductor in classical music, even if instrumentalists are performing polyrhythms.
Edit: Reading this back it comes across as a bit patronising, which wasn’t my goal at all - I genuinely wanted to understand the question so I could provide helpful info. Sorry, if I caused any offence!
