I know you can setup polymeters on a Digitakt 2 pretty easy (length of the pattern), but is it possible to setup polyrhythms?
Example - all of these tracks will take the same amount of time to rotate thru 1 pattern:
Track 1 - 32 beats, 2 measures of 16 beats (4/4)
Track 2 - 24 beats, 2 measures of 12 beats (6/8)
Track 3 - 20 beats, 2 measure of 10 beats (5/8)
that way you can have 4 against 3 against 5 all on a grid. I’m doing it now with unquantized recording, but its not easy to edit. thx all!
‘FUNC + PAGE’. Make sure you’re set to ‘PER TRACK’ to be able to set independent track lengths. Then, in the same mode, push ‘PAGE’ until you have two pages lit up and select the appropriate step for the last step.
You can use ‘RESET’ in the menu to set a master length.
We may be talking about the same thing but I think you described polymeter, what I mean is that each of those 4 tracks takes the same time to go thru, so in the space of hte 32 beats of track 1 you would have 24 beats of track 2 and 20 beats of track 3, so you have 4 playing against 3 playing against 5…
this maybe can be done with retrig rates, microtiming, or changing the scale resolution per track but someone smarter than me is going to have to explain it lol
You can get a couple of special cases by using track speed on page setup. Certainly I’ve had 12 beats on one track playing against 16 on the other tracks. But ratios including 5, 7 etc are not going to happen that way.
As someone said above, the most straightforward way of doing ternary/duple polyrhythms is to set the ternary tracks to 3/4 or 3/2 speed and calculate the number of steps accordingly.
For quint and septuplets I think the only way is to use micro timing, there are a couple of previous posts on this
Different thing but might be interesting
Also fwiw I’ve had this pdf downloaded from someone I think on this board - can’t remember who so can’t credit, was a long time ago - with a table of micro timing values for various scale lengths, might assist but I’m not 100% sure I really get it (edit - found the source here and it turns out the reason I didn’t get it is because it’s doing something different, giving microtiming values for various euclidean patterns, still might be of interest):
If you know there are 384 ticks per step you can probably work it out from there, although it’ll always be an approximation given that it’s not divisible by 5 or 7. Tbh I mainly just roughly work out about where onsets should fall and go by ear from there on Elektron boxes.
Yeah - that’s why I was a bit confused by that pdf. I had thought it was more to do with tuplets because my understanding of the euclidean approach is that the whole point is that it lands on even steps - it was only when I went back and read the title of the reddit thread that I looked like might be relevant to euclidean patterns.
Tbh I’d just had the pdf sitting there for a while and assumed it was just that my brain isn’t big enough to figure it out, but that others on this board might find it useful - was gonna delete but decided to leave it up for that reason.
Actually it seems like I might have been right about that, it seems like it in fact is an attempt to break down various time signatures across 16 steps, or at least that’s what I’m taking from the OP’s explanation.
I will admit, I’m having a hard time following this even with a detailed explanation. I think my little brain would just prefer to do a quick reckoning and then use my ears, or tap it in and tweak from there.
I always knew there was a difference but had a hard time visualizing it.
Polymeter is what was describing and use a lot. Polyrhythm could certainly be achieved with track timing divisions and micro timing. It’d be tedious to sort out though that’s for sure.
That’s the approach they’re using already. They could get closer with track time divisions and micro timing. It’d be a lot to workout. I’m sure someone on Elektronauts has posted the different micro timing values to achieve certain uncommon, off-grid timings.
Coincidentally enough that’s exactly what we’re discussing in the summaries above - the full pdf is in my first post. Have to admit that it mainly just makes my brain hurt, but that’s probably just my brain.
thx all! to me the best solution would be to have the number of steps per beat configurable per track, so you could have high hats in 12/8 and kick & snare in 4/4. for now i’ll just record unquantized or import samples from a DAW.
I would love this as a feature tho!
(Logic can’t do this either - I should be able to say how many subdivisions there are per beat per track per measure, but thats not possible)
