Separate tempos?

hello, looks like a great machine.
please can u tell us if it will run each sequence/track at its own separate/individual tempo at the same time (tempo as opposed to time sig)?
thankewe, peace

not individual tempo per track . Tempo is global.
only individual length per track

peace

While there is not a way to manually specify several unique bpms beyond the global one, polyrhythm allows you to have a sort of independent tempo per track/pattern which is actually rhythmically useful - the sig in polyrhythm mode is more than just a time signature!

If your BPM is 100 and you’re using a 4:4 track, a track in 3:4 beside it will be at 75bpm - 5:4 would be at 125, and so on - these relationships get more complex if you’re higher up - for example, if bpm is 50bpm and you’re first track is 16:4 (200bpm), put beside that 15:4 (187.5bpm) and they’ll be quite unique tempo-wise, but still sync up if you want them too. Add in a track with 11:2 (118.75bpm) and things just get silly (but again, they can be in sync if you’d like or phase if you’d prefer it, so you end up with a good amount of control).

Actual manual bpm unique for each track would just be crazy to try and manage/sequence independently while keeping any sort of coherence, so polyrhythms create a happy medium since they’re still rhythmically connected.

The math to get the “actual bpm” out of the polyrhythm sig, btw, is:

Track BPM = Global BPM * ( (sig upper number / 4) * (sig lower number / 4) )

(assuming zoom x4 of course, otherwise the 4 divisor would change - this allows even finer control over things, btw, since zoom is also track independent)

If you’re truly set on completely independent time signatures, you may want to try the polymetric looper - it’s not very exact, but you can create loops of any length to phase against each other using the looper, and if you’re not one for live recording, you can just delete the content after defining the loop length and write in whatever you’d like - far from perfect, but if you’re really set on totally independent tempos, that’s another option.

Hope this helps!

4 Likes