Hey! New owner of Model:Samples, first-time Elektron user. This box is a blast.
I’ve noticed that working in 3/4 is not quite as transparent as I thought because “16” is still the physical law of the land. I set a pattern scale to 12, click to 3/4. Then I record a very basic waltz pattern. All good. Then I double Pattern length to 24, expecting the exact doubling of length and note Placement you would expect if doubling a 16 step pattern.
But no, M:S is playing the second downbeat of the waltz on 17, not 13–so 3/4 is kind of virtual with no hard reset on multiples of 3, and the physical trigs are still boss. UNLESS, I am not fully understanding the function of “CHG”…
And…the absence of song mode/savable pattern chains per project is a major buzzkill for me and really limits the live usefulness of the M:S. No intent to fire up a tired old debate. I just need my voice to be heard in that choir. I knew the situation when I bought. One can dream.
Welcome to the forum. Yeah, this is a known pain in the ass. Elektrons don’t play nice with odd time signatures and instead expect users to do some mental gymnastics to work with them against a 16-step grid. One thing you can do is hold as many trigs as required (or physically possible), copy them, then manually paste them where you need them to fill up the 24 steps as required. You’ll have to do this for all trigs and tracks (hence the pain in the ass comment above), but at least you can do multiple trigs at once. There’s always a workaround somewhere - well, except song mode haha. For that, another box/daw to tell it when to change patterns etc etc.
Yeah this is a huge pain I’ve experienced that should be addressed… Arturia’s drumbrute doesnt have this issue, it doubles trigs exactly how one would hope even in patterns outside of 16 beats long.
Thank you for the very helpful response. If you read my post again you will see I did not call it a bug out flaw and offered that it could just be my misunderstanding. I did not find the manual helpful in this issue, but your response was extremely helpful. I call that the system working
I think that is quite a complicated work around for what should be a simple task and it will get messy when you want more than one bar. And that is before thinking about the accent requirements of different time signatures.
I agree it is how it is done on Elektron sequencers. Whether it is simple will depend on the individual.
The term work around is normally applied where a specific function is straight forward on one device but the same function is more convoluted on another device.
I think you would agree that there are hardware, 64 step, pattern based sequencers which allow 3/4 to be just as straight forward as 4/4.
I don’t agree with this. It is a workaround because the ideal solution would be to set page 1 to 12 steps, then when duplicating pages, each of them would have the same 12 steps (each missing 4 steps). But anyway, I agree with you that for now (unless a firmware update comes along) your suggestions are the best way to achieve things.
BTW, welcome back! I haven’t seen you in ages on here. And I’m really missing your music orientated YouTube videos! Please make more
How to subdivide a given time signature across sixteen steps isn’t what I was criticizing, which is implemented very well, but how Elektron has implemented pattern extension. I have read the manual, and here’s the pertinent passage:
Trigs are automatically copied when extending the length of a pattern. If a pattern consists of for example two pages and the pattern length is increased to four pages; the two added pattern pages will be copies of the first two pattern pages.
When extending a pattern, the sequencer uses the number of pages as it’s bounds of what to copy rather than the currently set pattern length. This is a feature designed to intuitively extend a pattern’s length, but is only implemented to be intuitive if one is always using the full 16 steps on any given page.
Your example hold some weight when using a pattern length divisible by 3, but if one is programming something divisible by 5 or 7 then you’re out of luck. So, what would be more intuitive and useful is to use the current pattern length as the bounds for extend the pattern, rather than the number of pages.
Not talking down about Elektron, not trying to say other devices are better, simply giving an example of how another device implemented this same idea in a more intuitive manned (a device that, for the record, pales in comparison to every Elektron device I’ve ever used).
The handling of odd (given the assupmtion everything but 4/4 is odd) time signatures is dependent on track length and track scaling.
The physical interface of the instrument is based around 16 buttons and steps.
A. If you’d attach your bars to (physical) pages, you’d “waste” a few steps of on every page and out of the total of 64.
B. I’f you’d make the bars-to-pages an option, you’d create a more complex menu system.
I’m certain that both A and B would upset someone.
I’m well aware I’m touching semantics here, but…
My description above is not a work around. It’s not “the best solution”. It’s the solution. It is how you approach non-four-four time signatures on the Elektron instruments.
So if you wanna make music; Learn the instrument (with quirks and all). Maybe browse the manual.
But if you’d rather discuss other instruments and implementations, then sure… Start a feature request thread. Oh. wait. I guess that’s been done.
Make that a menu option, so people can toggle A->B.
Hmm… I have think about a proper Elektron term…step scaling? Page warping is not very Elektron…Page wrapping?
Step scaling is perfect^^
A way of simply doubling up an odd step length track and its trigs would be very useful but I am not sure it would be possible because often the spacing of trigs is uneven, requiring the duplicated trigs to occupy different steps or microtimed positions when relocated, you would need a way to calculate the spacing between the trigs in order to lay them out correctly across the additional steps.
To me in basic terms, Elektron allow you to set total pattern length anything from 1 trig to 64 trigs: however, you cannot set specific Page/Bar lengths (i.e. if you set Page 1 to be 12 trigs long, then Pages 2, 3 and 4 will also be 12 trigs long).
I would suggest that the ability to set Page/bar lenghts is more useful when considering different time signatures.
I have read your post a number of times and am sorry but I have a problem with where you have stated:
" Or you do 16 steps at 3/4 tempo for one bar of 3/4 divided in triplets."
In any one bar which has a 3/4 time signature, irrespective of what sub-division of note/rest value you use to count (e.g. 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 etc. or their triplet values ) the resulting figure will always be equally divisible by 3 (hence never 16).
So using 1/4 = 3, using 1/8 = 6, using 1/16 =12, using 1/4 triplet = 9, using 1/8 triplet = 18. using 1/16 triplet = 24 etc.
The bar can obviously contain different sub-divisions of note/rest value but they will always add up to a value equal to 3 quarter notes.
Tempo does not affect time signature and vice versa so I don’t understand when you talk about 3/4 tempo?
Playing 12 steps (16ths) at x1 tempo equals to playing 9 steps (8th note triplets) at x3/4 tempo. I was aiming for the fact that the tempo scaler/multiplier does (directly) not have to do with time signature. But it’s easy to think that x3/4 signals time signature.
I’ve done a few videos on these features (I think the feature set is pretty much similar to the Digis and the tiny grey ones at this point):
I’m not up for trying to describe these features in text. But the gist of my input this far:
You need to understand track length.
You need to understand tempo scale.
You need to come to terms with that pages are not hard-wired to bars.
A great deal of mine as well. Model:Samples will find it’s place in the the land 3 and 6 but it gets pretty mathy for little old me. Sill, I welcome the mind expansion.
Meanwhile I have worked through pretty much the whole manual and feature set (left some of the implications of conditional locks for another day), and I really do enjoy this unit a lot. It really strikes as me as an instrument.
