Noob Polyrhythm Question

[justinw]

Cenk’s “Be There” from 2017 -

I’m trying to figure out the timing of the bass beat when it comes in at 0:40. It’s a single repeated note, 5 equally spaced beats and then (possibly) a short rest.

But how is this particular effect achieved inside of an underlying 4/4 beat ? Is it -

• some kind of 5/4 beat (don’t think so due to slight pause at the end)
• some kind of offset to the regular 4/4 (don’t think so as 5+ notes squeezed in)
• some kind of swing beat ?
• something else ?

TIA

[ccr]

It’s not really polyrhythmic. When you count in 16 steps, the bass note is on 1 and 7, one time out of two.

Edit: maybe the second tone comes a bit later, more towards 8 (microtiming? envelope?), but it is definitely not polyrhythmic.

[what_lives]

To my ears it’s a regular 16 step loop with notes on step 1, 4, 7, 10 and 13, plus an occasional variation where notes on 3 and 12 are added.

[craig]

Not specific to the Cenk song, but some brilliant Elektronaut produced this chart for creating all kinds of different time signatures/polyrhythms. Very useful!

Polyrhythm Table for Micro Timings (Triplets, Quintets, etc.)

I didn’t find this on the Forum so I made up a small table that will help to program polyrhythms with micro Timings. The Problem: You wanna play breaks with triplets or septets with your hihat or snare, but you dont wanna leave your 1/16 grid? You can do this with retriggers or setting up da different scale for the track. But this isnt as flexible as doing it with Micro Timings. With uTiming you can play Triplets, Quartets and Quintet all together in the same pattern on the same track! [image] …

[astricii]

Sounds almost like dotted 8th notes just put one and a half 8th notes between trigs 1 4 7 10 13 16. Take off the trig on 16 and you’ve got his pattern.

[justinw]

@what_lives @astricii I think that’s exactly it, thank you. Memo to self - ignore all the fancy explanations and just think in 16 beats

[astricii]

For sure learning to hear note lengths is a great bit of theory to nail down. now if you wanted to make it truly poly metric you could set the track length to like 15 and the master length to INF (I’m not into doing the whole least common multiple math for all my tracks too much math ) and you’ll have an unending train of dotted 8th note bass line weaving in and out of the pattern. huge part of modern techno not as much in pop stuff but can be really fun.