Ahh i didnt catch the pattern chaining workaround! Thats super helpful, thanks man.
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.
As a relatively new AK user, I would have to agree unless I am missing something. Played in a nice āgrooveā in 7 and then am forced to do maths to figure out where i amin the pattern.
Try feeding the midi output of āBeat Scholarā into whatever variant of the Elektron sequencer you have.
ā¦music is based on mathā¦
elektron sequencers are in essence all the same and also based on nothing but mathā¦
so, whenver u want āoddā countings, use ur fingers and do some mathā¦itās all in thereā¦
while even straightest 4/4 can get an easy forever rolling twist with only one polymeter element involvedā¦
so, dedicate one single track of each pattern and shorten it a little, let it run āout of timeā and see where it can take all ur slave to the rhythm mantrasā¦
Music is also meant to be playableā¦ In music notation someone invented bars for a reason.
ā¦playableā¦repeatableā¦doableā¦roundableā¦
in the meantime, everything countsā¦
3.1415927ā¦only the first seven digits after komma into the eternity of piā¦
the endless battle for the quadrature of the perfect circleā¦
each 'n every boing, bumm, tschakkā¦needs some klak zakk zakkā¦and backā¦
Yes I realize that. But if Iām thinking/playing in 7 (or 14), for example, pages donāt line up to ābarsā. Not insurmountable of course, the maths is not that complicated but itās slightly annoying.
Man, we donāt need to downplay it. Itās crazy lame. Iām 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, whatās 2 + 3? Hell if I know! Iām at home, b*tches!
Naw, but seriously, itās pretty annoying.
As such you canāt really do odd time signatures on Elektron gear.
It is doable but who wants to make maths while creating? Personnaly it is a killer, iād never recommend to anyone whoās interested to get Elektron. And not only because i suck at maths
Some simple solutions exist and are still ignored
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 āskipā trig condition on the last 4 trigs per page to effectively get 3/4 time signature.
That āskipā trigger condition actually could be a nice idea because you could combine with probability for some interesting variations. It wouldnāt be as smooth for copying pages etc though. Either would be an improvement though.
Iāve just got a little sheet like this that I look at if Iām going a bit mental with the step counts.
If you do the rows in different colours itās easy to spot what number is where. It becomes second nature pretty quickly.
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
If youāre live recording, this works just fine. But if youāre manually placing trigs in grid edit mode, it becomes a nightmare once youāre 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, youāll be copying 4/4 worth of trigs, which include parts of 2 bars, and may or may not include 2 downbeats. Itās the reason I sometimes restort to āconvertingā my 3/4 idea into 4/4 just to avoid this.
I put the downbeats for 4/4, 3/4 and 7/8 time on @Fin25ās 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 canāt copy-paste pages any more because the downbeats donāt align with the page length.
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.
For some rythms youāll end up having to use micro timing, itās just not serious.
Plus the fact that we are speaking about polyrythms, letās not even think about polymeters.
As long as you use 1 page patterns (below 16 setps) with trig conditions, itās dead easy to use odd time signature.
Is it possible to alling as many irregular patterns as you want in song mode?
Sure, but using only 1 page really limits your options when it comes to stuff like chord progressions and longer melodies. Using song mode to string together many 1-page patterns could work, but since the digi-boxes donāt have kits your parameter tweaks wonāt carry over to the next pattern.