Irregular time signatures and the Elektron workflow - thoughts?

Elektron Gear
#21

Merry Christmas mate.

You didn’t find the bits about chaining patterns of odd time signatures helpful? For instance, if you’re wanting to play in 7, Pattern A01 is two pages, a bar of four (16 steps) on page one, and a bar of three (12 steps) on page two? Then to get to the next bar of the pattern, put it on A02, then on to A03, etc. Enter song mode, or chain the patterns together.

This way you can visualize the 7 (or whatever it is) a lot better. Instead of having to think to yourself “okay my beat resets on the 13th step of the second page” which, for me, really fucks with my brain.

4 Likes
#22

Ahh i didnt catch the pattern chaining workaround! Thats super helpful, thanks man.

#23

Just came across this issue when wanting to work in 3/4. Pattern chaining 1 bar patterns is the only and best possible way to make this happen.

#24

As a relatively new AK user, I would have to agree unless I am missing something. Played in a nice “groove” in 7 and then am forced to do maths to figure out where i amin the pattern.

3 Likes
#25

Try feeding the midi output of ‘Beat Scholar’ into whatever variant of the Elektron sequencer you have.

#26
1 Like
#27

…music is based on math…
elektron sequencers are in essence all the same and also based on nothing but math…
so, whenver u want “odd” countings, use ur fingers and do some math…it’s all in there…

while even straightest 4/4 can get an easy forever rolling twist with only one polymeter element involved…
so, dedicate one single track of each pattern and shorten it a little, let it run “out of time” and see where it can take all ur slave to the rhythm mantras…

2 Likes
#28

Music is also meant to be playable… In music notation someone invented bars for a reason.

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#29

…playable…repeatable…doable…roundable…

in the meantime, everything counts…
3.1415927…only the first seven digits after komma into the eternity of pi…
the endless battle for the quadrature of the perfect circle…
each 'n every boing, bumm, tschakk…needs some klak zakk zakk…and back…

#30

Yes I realize that. But if I’m thinking/playing in 7 (or 14), for example, pages don’t line up to ‘bars’. Not insurmountable of course, the maths is not that complicated but it’s slightly annoying.

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#31

Man, we don’t need to downplay it. It’s crazy lame. I’m a math teacher. You think I wanna be doing math on my time off? Hell no! I get home, and all numbers go out the door. Quick, what’s 2 + 3? Hell if I know! I’m at home, b*tches!

Naw, but seriously, it’s pretty annoying.

2 Likes
#32

As such you can’t really do odd time signatures on Elektron gear.
It is doable but who wants to make maths while creating? Personnaly it is a killer, i’d never recommend to anyone who’s interested to get Elektron. And not only because i suck at maths :wink:

Some simple solutions exist and are still ignored :man_shrugging:t3:

1 Like
#33

Being able to set number of steps per page would be really helpful when copying and pasting pages, too. I made a feature request video a while back with more details on how and why this would be helpful.

Another way to solve this time signature issue is if there was a trig condition to skip a trig entirely. Then you could just set the “skip” trig condition on the last 4 trigs per page to effectively get 3/4 time signature.

6 Likes
#34

That “skip” trigger condition actually could be a nice idea because you could combine with probability for some interesting variations. It wouldn’t be as smooth for copying pages etc though. Either would be an improvement though.

1 Like
#35

I’ve just got a little sheet like this that I look at if I’m going a bit mental with the step counts.

Screenshot_20221007-011047
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If you do the rows in different colours it’s easy to spot what number is where. It becomes second nature pretty quickly.

3 Likes
#36

I think the most natural is to not think about it so much. Just make the sequence duration so that it adds up (63 for 7/8 for example). Make the element that grounds the time signature first ( here you would have to count a little). After that just go by ear for the rest of the elements. No need to count

#37

If you’re live recording, this works just fine. But if you’re manually placing trigs in grid edit mode, it becomes a nightmare once you’re past the 1st page. If you have a 3/4 time signature, you can set the page length to 48 steps. But this means that the downbeat of the 2nd bar is on step 13 on the 1st page. And the downbeat of the 3rd bar is on step 8 of the 2nd page. Everything becomes skewed and hard to work with, and it makes it impossible to copy and paste pages. Instead of copying a bar in 3/4 time, you’ll be copying 4/4 worth of trigs, which include parts of 2 bars, and may or may not include 2 downbeats. It’s the reason I sometimes restort to “converting” my 3/4 idea into 4/4 just to avoid this.

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I put the downbeats for 4/4, 3/4 and 7/8 time on @Fin25’s sheet, just to illustrate how non-conducive the locked 16-steps-per-page is to non-4/4 time. With 4/4 time, all the downbeats land on step 1 on every page, but for anything else you can’t copy-paste pages any more because the downbeats don’t align with the page length.

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#38

Having steps per page would be ideal, but it would already be a huge improvement to the current implementation if the metronome settings were used to color-code the downbeat trig, for instance.

#39

For some rythms you’ll end up having to use micro timing, it’s just not serious.
Plus the fact that we are speaking about polyrythms, let’s not even think about polymeters.

1 Like
#40

As long as you use 1 page patterns (below 16 setps) with trig conditions, it’s dead easy to use odd time signature.
Is it possible to alling as many irregular patterns as you want in song mode?