Rytm tips and tricks

bgEN · 2024-07-04T03:30:30.038Z

Was messing around tonight, doing things I couldn’t understand, things I wouldn’t understand, things I shouldn’t understand… until now! I present to you,

Ping Pong Looping on the Rytm!!mtyR eht no gnipooL gnoP gniP

Now, before you get all technical and lawyered up, no it’s not a full on ping pong looping mode, but you can definitely scan through a long sample as if it were tape.

The Set Up
Get a nice four bar loop where you can definitely tell if it’s playing backwards or forwards, like a synth arp. Infinite amp decay. Turn SRC all the way down and SMPL all the way up, we just want the sample playing. The START should be at 0, the END at 120. Turn LOOP to ON.

On the TRIG page, turn SMP to ON (default). Expand the measures to 64/64.

The Trick
On the track of your sample, place a trig on step 1.

Then, put a trig on step 9. Now, go to the SMP page, and for that step 9 trig, plock the START to 120 and the END to 0. For even neater ideas, plock the TUNE to +5, you’ll see.

Now play it… And as soon as the first trig hits, on the TRIG page turn SMP to OFF. The loop will go to the 9th step and then FROM THAT POINT play backwards, then forwards again when it hits the first trig. If you messed with the tuning, it will even rewind PAST the beginning point and then go forward again at regular speed.

You could do some weird fake record scratching if you mess with the tuning for each plock.

If you want, you can put a plocked SMP=ON trig somewhere and only have it trigger FIRST time through, etc etc.

Are y’all even actually trying these tips? They’re pretty fun.

If you look at my “16 Track Rytm” tip, you could take that idea and have 8 independent loops doing weird ping ponging back and forth kinda stuff, like tape machines being run forwards and backwards.

You could put the same loop on two tracks, pan one left, the other right, and then instead of plocking the TUNE to +5 you could plock the FINE TUNE to a value and have the two slowly drift in and out of sync. This would work good on like someone talking, I think, trippy and phasey.

EDIT: Here, have an example:

alechko · 2024-09-30T16:57:36.441Z

TIL that long press on the will open the Load Project menu

sid6581 · 2024-11-20T19:53:06.097Z

Not sure if anyone has posted this on Elektronauts elsewhere, but I enjoyed this video.

Sternenlicht · 2024-11-20T22:25:26.286Z

So, what is your recommended amount of samples for a sample chain (I go with 30, but that is an interval of 4 (120/4)? I mean percussive samples, do you make different chains for synth stuff, or do you mesh these, and hope for intresting results while scanning them? Do you just do sound locks, with sample offset, or random LFO to sample start? Would that work at all? I.e. mod depth to a fixed value, would not scan all the samples in the chain?

(I used the method with base sample, and then plocking offsets - but that is kind a work intensive - so maybe there are better ways to do it?)

matteblacksmoke · 2024-11-20T22:30:41.375Z

stimming is so cool. i just want to hang with that guy.

Skorheim · 2024-11-21T03:11:34.788Z

Don’t know this was obvious or not, but I just figured out that a 2 bar ‘amen’ sample breaks up evenly in multiples of 15, if anybody was wondering

Sleepyhead · 2024-12-07T10:58:49.374Z

Cool trick!

B_LD · 2025-04-18T18:45:19.155Z

Can anyone confirm the above chopping trick by @shortcircuit was working? I just tried it with OS1.72 and can’t seem to make retrigs work as required….

uNAQ · 2025-04-18T20:09:08.116Z

Anyone have any interesting suggestions on what to use the trigs on the FX track sequencer.
How do you usually go about it?

Schnork · 2025-04-18T20:22:29.609Z

I usually use them to duck the reverb to achieve an effect similar to sidechaining the reverb to a kick. Trigs on the same steps as the kick, lfo with exponential wave in one shot mode modulating reverb mix volume.
Use negative depth (-40 to -80 depending on how strong you want your ducking effect and how much reverb you have in the mix). Speed is around 20 (fine tune by ear to get it to pump with the groove) with multipler set to x8.

uNAQ · 2025-04-19T06:11:38.086Z

Cool one.
I will sometimes put trigs on where the kick is and route it to the symmetry parameter.
The effect is to get a type of distortion modulation that can go as far as breaking the sound.
If using a mixer is nice to route some channels to the main outs and use that trick in a techno or ambient context.

Also puting trigs and modulating the delay time, then adding some slides can also get freaky.

Anyone got any other interesting suggestions to try out?

Schnork · 2025-04-20T19:15:56.250Z

uNAQ:

I will sometimes put trigs on where the kick is and route it to the symmetry parameter.
The effect is to get a type of distortion modulation that can go as far as breaking the sound.
If using a mixer is nice to route some channels to the main outs and use that trick in a techno or ambient context.

Nice! That’s actually a really cool idea. I’ve never used the master distortion much, because things get hissy and noisy pretty quickly, but this is fun! So far I tried to target hats and other high freq sounds by putting trigs offbeat or somewhere else inbetween kicks and let the symmetry chop off just a bit of the high freq content.
Could also use p-locks on some of the trigs.

Btw, this reminds me of two things; The video about modulating the compressor on the Octatrack to change the groove/feel of a track, mainly modulating attack and release. Only one lfo on the Rytm, but p-locking is an option, or maybe midi lfos could be used as well (OTs midi lfos work fairly well, even for timing sensitive stuff.

Second one is from an Elektron video (a demo of one of the OS updates) where Dataline used the noise generator on certain steps to trigger the compressor and thus change the groove of the whole mix. I tried it a few times, but couldn’t really get it right.
Not sure how Dataline had set the compressor, but sounds like a potentially useful trick.

uNAQ · 2025-04-21T08:41:11.417Z

Cool ones.
Gonna try them out and experiment

johngredin · 2025-04-21T16:12:49.826Z

Some stuff I love to do on top what’s been suggested:

Gated reverb vibe or ghost rythms with volume automations on reverb.
Playing with the len, tail or the freq or reverb can do a lot for tonal sculpting
Modulating delay time for glitch FX (can do wonder with conditional trigs)
Lock the LFO on different parameters, so you can rythmically automate more than one FX (and do crazy audio rate modulations on the comp, distortion and reverb)

Bitsnbobs · 2025-04-21T16:26:47.938Z

so i found a thing about key tracking the rytm but i could not implement it - can anybody help?

shortcircuit · 2025-04-23T13:20:07.993Z

hey @B_LD, i can’t be of much help as i didn’t install the latest firmware, but i can confirm that it works on the 1.70 os

B_LD · 2025-04-23T13:38:31.495Z

Hey @shortcircuit, many thanks for your reply.

I still have a question that was a bit unclear to me:
If you say “retrig lenght of 20 will have a retrig velocity on 20” I wonder which parameters you are actually referring to.
Because my understanding would be: if let’s say a “chop” is 1/8th note long you want to have duration/retrig length of 1/8th set for it, right? And the retrig rate would be set to anything that makes sense soundwise?

May also be, that I’m completely on the wrong track here.

alechko · 2025-04-24T18:42:42.598Z

oh man, there’s so many, after you’ve done sliding between values of stuff remember that you can also set conditions to the trigs, as well as page length, you can create radical sound effects just with p-locking and sliding between delay time or smooth and barely noticeable changes in atmosphere with reverb filter/shelf or compressor settings, like add compression but reduce the wet a bit.
you can also play a lot with p-locking the distortion symmetry and resample very glitchy but rhythmic noise effects.
also, you can set the fill condition to have reverb tail and delay feedback to go up with the press of a fill button, these trigs need to be reset by the next trig so you can create timed transitions with this approach.

uNAQ · 2025-04-25T08:27:41.206Z

Wooooooo
The last tip with the fill is super useful!!!

Heard a comment on my last set concerning some of my transitions.
Still looking for ways to pass sensibly from a 145bpm to a 110bpm track, without half the crowd cringing from the abrupt cuts and changes of tempo.
Thanks!!!

B_LD · 2025-04-25T09:02:48.764Z

Another time stretching trick with Parameter Slides. Apologies if this had been mentioned elsewhere, didn’t see it while searching…

Start with a 1 bar loop. Sample start to 0, sample end to 0.05, loop=on.
Place a trig on step 1, activate parameter slide on it.
Place a trig on step 16, lock sample start to 119.95 and end to 120. Microtime that trig to the rightmost position.
Hit play. Play around with sample tune and tempo.
It’s also possible to set longer looping fragments. Or set them unevenly.

Downside to this method: Introduces a lot of grit and works better if increasing tempo/tune. But there’s nice spots to be explored.