Ideas for breaking the grid?

Tracker
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I was playing around last night making “poly-rhythms” to try break the grid of the tracker format.

I set the pattern length to 80 (decimal) as that gives you 16 evenly spaced beats (every 5 steps) that you can mix with beats that are spaced in 2 or 4 or 8 in the same Pattern. While not poly-rhythmic as such it does give you interesting rhythmic variations to play with. You could expand this further by “spreading” your loop over two patterns so that the 1st step of the second pattern doesn’t fall on a downbeat where the maths doesn’t quite fit a single pattern.

Wondered if anyone else has come up with some mathematical (or otherwise) workarounds? Throwing in some Roll FX with slow repeats also adds interest but there’s not enough melodic control over the rolls to be deliberate.

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Performance mode is your friend. Make two patterns of different length. You can combine the tracks of those patterns in one performance resulting in the most intricate polyrithms your can think of.

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Holy shit, I hadn’t even thought of that! I actually just assumed there’s be some sort of resync of the tracks in Performance mode but that’s very interesting :+1:

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For one song I was working on where the math didn’t work in my favor I did it the manual way similar to what you mentioned with additional patterns.

  • Figure out which note in the sequence the pattern ends on → say note 8/9
  • Scroll up copy a full 9 notes of the sequence but start from the next note (9/9)
  • Jump to the next pattern, paste with skip one until it’s full
  • Repeat for the next one

It is rather error prone if you’re not paying full attention with the copy pasta :smiling_face_with_tear:. I think at the start I just took the first/start pattern and duplicated it and afterwards went back and retouched the tracks which had sequences that didn’t line up to/divide well with the pattern lengths.

Not the most fun solution but I was going for something specific recreating an existing piece (Uncharted Worlds), so it helped that I knew what I wanted to end with and didn’t need to experiment. I think it was only 2-3 out of 6 tracks where I had to fiddle to line things up.

I’ll have to play with @pt3r ‘s suggestion next time I work on something new, with some careful combination of patterns I probably could have made that work as well.

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