As an exercise, I’m trying to convince a Syntakt to play Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music,” a live performance of which you can see here:
This is a very simple piece of music. Two tracks, each one nothing but hand claps.
Track 1 is 12 beats long, with a pattern of xxx-xx-x-xx- each time through. It plays 84 times, for a total of 1008 beats.
You can think of Track 2 as being identical to Track 1, but it plays differently: Every 6 times through, it shifts by one beat until it has wrapped completely around to match Track 1 again. The total is still 1008 beats.
If it were possible to set an individual track to repeat after 73 beats, it would be easy: Just tell the first trig in the track not to play the 7th time through. But 73 is bigger than 64, so I can’t think of a way to manage this.
Of course, I could make each track repeat 5 times instead of 6–but that’s kind of cheating. In fact, in the original score, each voice repeated its 12-beat pattern 12 times, not 6.
Suggestions?