Odd Time Signatures?

Hi there guys,

well, first of all: Sorry if my English isn’t perfect; it’s not my mother’s tongue.

I am VERY new to the renoise forums, just signed up, mainly because I have some questions that bothered me for some time now. Maybe you guys can help me out

I fooled around for quite a while now with renoise (love it :D), but well…as I said I just kinda fooled around with it, and never really finished anything.(Btw: talking about breakcore here).

About a week ago I started a new Track, and from the beginning on I had a feeling that I’m going to like it.
I kept on and on working on it, and now it’s about 2:10 long.

It took me some time, but I realized that a lot of the stuff that sounds good in my opinion just came up randomly… I don’t really have a work flow I can stick to…Mainly I look for samples I want to use, and fool around with them, so the finished product is actually pretty random in the way it sounds…nothing is really clear when I start producing something.

In many interviews and on some Wikipedia pages I read that Aaron Funk (Venetian Snares) uses a lot of odd time signatures, 7/4 being his favorite. So I started wondering how you actually make beats in a desired signature, since my beats are random most of the time.

Now, I know how to count a 7/4 beat for example (-ONE-, two, three, -ONE-, two, three, four), but how does that apply to some of the tracks he made?

Let’s take the song “Find Candace” for example…

at around 0:39 the beat comes in, and according to the Wikipedia Page it’s supposed to be in 7/4…but where would you start counting that? Is it the kicks? The snares? I have no
idea what actually make a time signature in percussion with that complexity…

How do you count odd time signatures in songs that complex, and what tells you that, for example, it’s in 7/4?
Is it the repetition of like…the kick or something like that?

How do you set renoise up to get a wanted time signature? (Lines per beat, Pattern Length, etc.)
Because the metronome seems to keep counting a 4/4 beat, no matter how many lines you add to a beat.

Do you guys have any -simple- example-xrns.files that show how to apply some time signatures to your percussion?

Hopefully you guys can help me out a bit with that problem^^

Kind regards,

ENAR

P.S. if anyone wants to check out the track I started working on a week ago, I just uploaded it to soundcloud:

https://soundcloud.com/enarskyel/25-years

Let’s take the song “Find Candace” for example…
(…)
at around 0:39 the beat comes in, and according to the Wikipedia Page it’s supposed to be in 7/4…but where would you start counting that?

Perhaps this edit with a metronome and some voice counting will help:

5575 vsnares-candace-7-4-time.mp3

Hi dblue, thank you very much for the reply…but could you tell me how to open that, please?

could you tell me how to open that, please?

I deleted and re-attached the file. Refresh the page and try to download it again. The MP3 should play in any player, or you can load it into Renoise as a sample.

Oh okay, sorry…

Thank you, I’ll check it out^^

So…dblue:

First of all thank you very much for the edit you made…it really helped (I think I just thought way to complicated…).

I have another question for you:

The metronome you can hear in your edit; did you actually make it manually, or is there any way how to set renoise’s metronome to an other time signature but 4/4?

The metronome you can hear in your edit; did you actually make it manually, or is there any way how to set renoise’s metronome to an other time signature but 4/4?

Renoise’s metronome currently only works with 4/4, so I manually loaded up the Metronome.wav from Renoise’s skin folder, and then created a phrase with the 7/4 pattern.

This approach is actually a lot more flexible, because you can set up a metronome instrument with a variety of different time signature phrases, and then trigger them at will during your patterns, allowing for much more complex rhythmic structures.

Here’s the basic XRNS from the MP3 anyway:
5579 vsnares-candace-7-4-time.xrns

Hopefully v.snares doesn’t mind the short loop from his song being included, in the spirit of fair use and learning.

Pro tip: Goofy speech generated using AT&T Natural Voices® Text-to-Speech Demo

Oh I see, okay. Thank you very much

It’s actually a really good idea to manually create a metronome.

Sorry for asking so much stuff, but I a few more questions:

When I open the xrns you uploaded, at the top it says that it’s at 4 LPB, but actually it looks like it’s at 28…why is that so?

And: Is there any way on how to match the BPM, and the LPB to a sample you load in (like you did it with snares’ loop)?

It would be very useful for sampling stuff if I knew a relyable way for that.

at the top it says that it’s at 4 LPB, but actually it looks like it’s at 28…why is that so?

I’ve just changed the pattern highlighting, so that each full bar of 7/4 is clearly visible.

Main Menu > Song > Pattern Highlight Options

Is there any way on how to match the BPM

No special trick to it, really. I simply triggered the sample at the start of the pattern, enabled the metronome, and then manually adjusted the BPM until everything lined up. Should only take a few guesses before you’re in the right general area, and then a few more adjustments to get it perfect. Never underestimate the raw power of those 2 awesome sound tools on the sides of your head

Coming at it from the other direction, if you happen to know exactly how many beats are in a sample loop, then you can use the Beatsync feature in the Sample Properties. When Beatsync is enabled, then it will always re-pitch the loop to fit your song BPM. For example, if I know that my loop contains exactly 4 beats, and I’m working at 4 LPB, then I would set Beatsync to 16 lines, ie. 4 x 4 = 16

Pressing the [T] button next to Beatsync will manually adjust the tuning of your sample, so that it matches your song BPM when played at its base note (C-4 by default). Maybe the sample needs to be transposed up or down a few semitones in order to match the BPM. If you hit the tune button and your sample’s Transpose and Finetune properties remain at precisely 0, then you know that your sample precisely matches your song BPM. So you can keep adjusting the BPM, then spam the tune button, and repeat that until you get 0. Kind of a neat trick

to go by hearing, by this tune for example, it might help to imagine the break starting at 0:38 is like 2 4/4 measures, but just with 1/4 missing in the second measure. But the tune goes so wild and syncopically later on (till the “melodic” intermission, and even much worse afterwards), that it gives the impression of being just chaos and rhythm tricks working on the lot. Discussions by advanced drummers (i.e. drumkit, expecially jazz, or certain african, arabic styles) can lighten up what’s done in the first “wilder” part and how - tho not for the part after the intermission, though it clears up a little later on, maybe asking the artist or aphex twin might give ideas. In the more "straight parts, you’ll notice a patter of a Boom - followed by one or two more right after the first, dotted notes - and then some hat/snare/rim type flutter till the second measure with one beat less than 4/4 is over and resuming the main pattern with another Boom stuff.

I write this, because I think apart from technical measurement it’s more important to have a “feel” for how it works, and know right while listening what’s going on. Probably that’s why only nerds like music like this, because most people have to actually “learn” to get that feel and be able to dig the music. Haha!

@dblue: Enabling the metronome and adjusting the BPM until it matches up is the way I did it before, too ^^

I don’t really use the beatsync option that much, because most of the time it just completely f**s up my samples (pitched way to high for example).

But thank you very much for all of your replies!

@OopsIFLY: That’s something that’s bothering me for quite a while now: Sometimes I just have NO IDEA what’s going on on some of his (an other artist’s) tracks…Of course I can spot the kick, the snare or the hat, but inbetween those drums…
I just can’t spot it. That pretty much is another example of why I said that most of the time, my beats/percussion etc. are “random”. I just don’t know (in your words: ) “how it works”. I Always just fill in the spaces inbetween my drum patterns with random stuff (stamples, beeps, clicks, etc.) until it sounds…“pretty okay”.

I’d be really interested in how (for example) venetian snares programs his percussion…Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not interested in ripping him off or something like that, I just want to know it so I have a basic idea of “what’s even possible”.