Is changing the number of lines in an instance (say 60 for 5/4, with 3 measures of 5/4 in each pattern) an adequate way to screw around with odd time sigs on Renoise? I tried doing just that and it sounds…weird…weirder then an odd time sig usually does.
Yea I’m pretty sure it’s the only way with trackers, atleast that’s how I’ve always done it.
60 lines for 5/4? Are you working in 6 or 12 LPB to give you easy access to triplets? 80 would make more sense to many people, giving the same spacing as 64lines 4/4 pattern in a 5/4 pattern.
When you initate renoise you start with a 64 line track with lpb set to 4 giving you 4 bars similar to this:
each whole note is 16 line, a half note is 8 lines and a quater note is 4 lines which is the beat and the highlighted lines. So if you want to do 5/4 rather than 4/4 you need to add another quater note per bar so that there are 20 lines per bar. So yeah, if you set it to 60 you get 3 5/4 bars, although as kazakore mentioned it would make more sense to do 80 lines since that would give you 4 bars.
Did you change the LPB value?
You know Lines per Beat doesn’t really matter since there is always an even timing between lines, what it does is calculate the tempo of the song. The thing that matters is how you program the beat and how many lines there is in your track. I often make songs in 3/4 using 4 lpb since it allows for doing actions off-beat. Using 4 lpb in 3/4 means you can do 6/8 rather than 9/12 which is what you would get if you used 3 lpb. Setting the lpb is extremely useful for organizing since it highlight the beat lines but it changes the division level metering and if you set it to 5lpb you end up doing 25/20 which is a pretty crazy time signature, I don’t know if that what happened. It was one of the things that confused me in the beginning.
Or maybe you ended up doing 2 30 line bars (30/16 meter) or 4 15 (15/16 meter). Otherwise it should be right. 5/4 just sounds like that.
Why does it sound weird? Can you post an example?
All my recent tracks use odd time sigs and I usually only change the number of lines. Sometimes I change LPB too, sometimes not.
Alright I think I got it. The synth I was using just had a really low attack or something so it sounded just a second off. Buh. My fault! Thank you for your responses! I learned much from them even though the problem was of a different nature!