A lot of people are stoked about scale per track on the DT/DN. Since I am not familiar with that feature, are there any good tuts on how to use it? Or maybe a basic explanation on how to use it in tracks? Tried messing around with different scales and step resolution, but I didn’t get the idea that I fully grasped its potential.
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Polyrythm is what you are looking for…
Best example would be: you want a standard kick beat. But you want a sorta triplet feel on the hi-hats so you put that at x3/2 or x3/4
And you want something wild on the snare so you load a bunch of conditionals on the snare running at x2
Or for synth, you’re able to construct longer pad sections by setting it at x1/4 because they’re just going to play whole notes anyway
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Thx. And master length is set to 16/16 in this scenario? I read things about mathematical divisions that are important when working with scales, but I really sucked at math.
Last night I set al four tracks to 64/64 and played around with the scales. But then not al tracks go all the way around. For example: on one track I set it to something like 1/4 or 1/8, but it was only (slowly) looping the first 8 steps.
You set master length to however long you want it to go before it resets- idiots approach is to set it to INF to ensure ongoing variation(and by “idiot” I mean me- that’s what I do)
You want to set Cng length to however long you want it to go before switching to your next pattern
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It’s not just for polyrhythms but also for getting more “sequence length” on a track where you might not need as much detail. By default each step represents a 16th note, but with scaling, you can make it so each step represents an 8th note, or even a whole note… You lose all the detail in between, but you gain a MUCH longer sequence, great if you want to lay out chords, pads, even simple bass lines.
And since the DT is a SAMPLER, you can use it as a loop arranger. Sample a bunch of one-bar loops, then set the scale so each step represents one bar, arrange the loops per step.
Or maybe not specifically loops, but any long samples where you just need to trigger them once and don’t need all the in-between steps.
Now this is something the DT could always do, BUT, now you can do it per track, and still have other tracks doing “normal scale” or even tighter stuff, like 32nd or 64th notes or whatever the limit is on the scaling…
Think of it like a zoom feature. You can zoom out, gaining sequence length but losing step detail, or you can zoom in, gaining step detail, but losing sequence length.
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Thx! Is it so that you have to set the chain length to off and the m.lenght to INF?
Because if I don’t, when the track lenght is at 64/64 and the scale set to 1/8, it just only loops the first 8 steps of the first page.
If you don’t intend on changing patterns then you can have chain set to off. But that parameter only comes into effect when you’re switch patterns- not when your pattern is playing.
The master is what’s dictating how your loop repeats(based on its x1 # of steps so /2 will be 8 steps, etc)
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Yeah, you have to adjust the master length to allow room for all your different track lengths & scales to play out and/or resolve. Think of the master length as a hard limit on how many steps everything will progress (based on the master tempo/scale I guess?), before resetting everything to the beginning. If you are using polyrhythms or other mismatched track lengths/scales going on, you might WANT to limit them so that they reset every 4 bars or 8 bars or something to keep things from drifting too far. Or if you set to INF, they will keep going forever based on their own lengths and never reset to the starting point unless you stop & restart the pattern.
For example if you have master length of 16 steps, and have a track of 5 steps, and another track of 20 steps, what will happen is:
5-step track: will play 5, then 5 again, then 5 again, then 1, then reset since it hit the 16th step, so it will perpetually play a 5, 5, 5, 1 sequence.
20-step track: will only play to the 16th step and reset, never playing anything beyond that
So if you want each track to just “do its own thing” without ever being forced to reset, set master length to INF.
If you want to enforce some structure, use master length of whatever value you need
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Neat trick there!
And thanks for clearly explaining ‘scale per track’,
i thought it meant being possible to divide different instruments over a scale of keys (with the Digitone Keys in mind and all…)
This comes in very handy with fast paced rhythms like for instance with a DnB track, no need to use up that many PTNs in a BNK and chaining them up to get some bars rolling. Great stuff!
Should be able to get some whacky odd meters in there too when being really adventurous
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You can find some nice videos related to scale-per-track here:
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If you need a quick way to calculate master length, there is an online Octatrack calculator that will also work for DT/DN: https://novinyl.net/octatrack.php
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Four years later and this info you laid down here is still doing a great job explaining how to do this with a great example and hypothetical. Makes this master and resolution time actually very easy to understand. I think what was confusing for me is that Roland has a completly different way it handles resolution.
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