Modalics has introduced Beat Scholar, a new software drum machine that they describe as “the ultimate rhythmic playground”.
Beat Scholar presents a new way to compose rhythm, making it easy to manipulate measures and subdivisions. Beat Scholar also features a robust sampler, built in effects, MIDI features, pattern triggering and more.
Features:
- Presents a unique & intuitive way to explore subdivisions, measures & create drum patterns.
- Divide beats into up to 42 slices and combine multiple drums on the same beat.
- Any drum can be placed anywhere
- Over 250 carefully curated samples, from classic drum machines & acoustic samples to synthesized drums hand-crafted especially for Beat Scholar (by Yonatan Meltzer)
- Load your own samples with an easy drag n’ drop interface.
- Built-in FX section to get you started quickly.
- Easy MIDI file export – drag directly from the plugin’s interface to your DAW.
- Use Beat Scholar to output midi to any instrument or even to hardware drum machines!
- Standalone, VST3, AU, AAX.
- Mac Intel & M1 / Windows Compatible.
- Tested Hosts: Logic, Pro Tools, Cubase, Ableton Live, Reaper
Pricing and Availability
Beat Scholar is available now for $79 USD, normally $99.
OK. I now consider my mind to have been blown! Finally, a rhythm product that is amenable to time changes mid-song. These guys are fantastic in their presentation, and coming from a relatively ancient prog background, I was particularly impressed with their ability to explain these concepts (that was always a major frustration I had trying to express what I wanted the drummer to do). Also, I was an early Jamstix adopter, hoping that it would be able to “sense” real-time time changes (which I never was able to get it to do, unfortunately). Recently, I’ve decided to go back and explore my prog roots, and I will be picking this beauty up as soon as I can,
Hey John!
I’m Or (The bassist 😉 ) Thank you so much for the kind words! We worked our butts off to make this product and it feels great to see someone understand and appreciate it so thoroughly.
We hope Beat Scholar brings you a ton of inspiration and joy. Feel free to keep in touch through our pages or Discord server: https://discord.gg/tNC5qEY57h
Best,
Or.
If you are reading this, can you guys (the narrators) point me to some of your music?
Hey John,
Thank you so much for the kind words! I’m Or (The bassist in the video).
We worked our butts off to make this app and it feels great to see someone understand and appreciate it so thoroughly 🙂
Feel free to keep in touch through our pages or discord server: https://discord.gg/tNC5qEY57h
Re. music – we’ve been producing proggy music in different shades and colors for the past 10 years or so.
Mostly under the moniker “Project RnL”
You can find most of our stuff here: https://www.youtube.com/user/ProjectRnL
and on spotify (there’s a full album).
There’s more stuff if you just look for Or Lubianiker or Eyal Amir on youtube.
Best,
Or.
Nice to see a clever new approach to exploring fun tuplets. It’s a bit like having Patterning on each beat/pizza.
It looks like step-rates are tied to the start of a beat, so some kinds of offset rhythms might be trickier to implement without some “tricks”. While the pizza graphic makes sense, it could be difficult to work with if you have lots of slices. I’d prefer the typical horizontal grid look, but with much more freedom to zoom. Would also love to see some non-grid rhythm options– a la the micro-edit stuff in BreakTweaker.
Still, there are some welcome features in there.
Patterning was one of our influences! it has some great mind-opening concepts.
We have both horizontal and vertical zoom, it’s mandatory when dealing with subdivisions of 20-42 pieces or when you’re working with tons of beats.
However this system is fairly economic in terms of the amount of information you see vs. the depth & complexity of the composition.
Thanks for checking it out!
Or.
What a refreshing design. Its like a cross between a video game and a set of highly developed macros. I’ve been looking for a rhythm-inspiration tool that doesn’t feel like I’m just pressing Play on a pre-fab loop. I need to RTFM first, but based on the demo, I’m going to A) take it as v.1 and enjoy the goods as-is and B) look forward to a few possible modest tweaks in v.2. Its a WIN.
We have a bunch of updates lined up to improve Beat Scholar! from probability engines and randomization features to deeper editing and customization options… all will be released for free. stay tuned 🙂
“Divide beats into up to 42 slices and combine multiple drums on the same beat.”
“Load your own samples with an easy drag n’ drop interface.“
“$79”
Sold.
color coded? no thanks!
May I ask why that is..?
I am color blind. generally when designers color-code, no other way is provided to determine the state the color is supposed to indicate. for instance: the ubiquitous bi/tri-color LEDS used so often to save space and cost, are completely unintelligible to us. 1 out of 20 folks are color-blind; we will never be satisfied customers with products like this.
designers: why not use SHAPES instead.
Based on what I am seeing here, I am guessing that the colors are assignable. Could you not just avoid the one or two colors that you are not able to differentiate between?
As you may know, the severity of what is diagnosed as color blindness, is highly dependent on how it is assessed. Total color blindness (monochromaticity) is, in fact, pretty rare (well less than 1/10000). After that, the diagnosis is usually based on visual discrimination tests of one sort or another. The Ishihara test (looking at a circle that has a number of smaller colored circles inside it where you try to discern the, usually, 2-digit number that is color coded) is a widely used test because of its statistical reliability. I have “color blindness” as diagnosed by that test, yet I score well within the one percentile group when using other tests, including the 100-hues test (where you sort 100 pastel blocks into RGB shades according to their color saturation). So, while 5% of people may, indeed, have a color blindness diagnosis, what that means is highly dependent on other factors. For me, as an example, it means almost nothing except that I represent an odd curiosity as far as the Ishihara test goes. Actually, the Wikipedia article on colorblindness is very good and contains an enormous amount of information.
thank you for the thoughtful response John.
I am red/green blind. colors are mostly unidentifiable for me; unless it’s blue. there are vast oceans of red, orange, green, brown, and yellow I can’t tell apart, or divine the name for.
it didn’t cause me too much pain when I was an engineer, there were plenty of tools to work around it in that environment. Musical instrument design lacks alternatives. other than ‘keep pushing the button until something recognizable changes’.
@jackelin, it’s more like the one or two colors I *can* differentiate. which doesn’t guarantee I could name those colors. I can tell traffic lights apart, but I can’t accurately name the colors; it’s more like white, green, and burnt out.
color blindness isn’t some straightforward thing, as John notes, it’s a complex process as prone to mistakes as normal color vision is prone to optical illusions. heuristics born from experience intrude; as such; tool boxes are red, not brown; school buses are yellow, not green; oranges are orange, not green.
it’s complicated. however, no problem with shapes!
Thank you both for bringing this up, I have to admit that it took me a couple of months to identify 16 distinct colors that non color blind people can differentiate between….and ones that will be also asthetically pleasing.
I thought this might come up and I recognize it’s an immediate disatvantage of this product. I’ll try and come up with a solution that will make this accessible for color blind people.
In full disclosure we are a really small company, Eyal and myself are doing 100% of the design, programming, marketing, tech support… So it might take us a while to get to it.
If I end up doing that, I’d be happy to have someone like you as a tester.
Best,
Or.
It is, indeed, complex. From time to time, I misname colors (especially when they contain an amount of green). Oddly, sometimes it works the other way, such as in the case of my car. The car is grey. I know that, but when I look at it, I will say “greenish”, even though I know what color it is supposed to be. I’m, otherwise, pretty lucky in that I can name most colors pretty accurately (which explains my performance on the 100-hues test). One component of the Ishihara test is that it involves much more cognitive processing than the other tests in that your brain is required to do two tasks, really. One is for it to be able to separate the colors into discreet recognizable entities and the other is to be able to extract the form of the numbers to be recognized using saturation differences of the colors. So, I’ve often wondered whether or not my very poor performance on that test may be influenced at some higher level of visual processing that exists apart from color discrimination.
yes, I can see many of the numbers in the ishihara test without the color differentiation. I’m super with spatial relations though.
to me, the opponent process theory makes the most sense of what I can and can’t see. except the yellow-green crossover. everything in the red/green ‘area’ is like a grey scale for me; it’s not color-less grey, it’s a nameless red/green/orange/yellow-ish smear of stuff that aliases with other colors.
if you’ve seen some of the optical illusions concerning contrasts in the presence of differing back grounds, then you know that the ability to identify colors also concerns the color of bordering regions. it’s a huge subjective mess trying to overcome what everyone else takes for granted.
btw, anyone else find it’s impossible to post here when not on wifi? cannot post on the road.
At this point, I’m pretty sure that nobody else here cares too much about this topic. I wish there was a way we could take this into private conversation because my current EEG research is encroaching on some of these issues and I would like to get some input from somebody who isn’t specifically in the field but has knowledge of the relevant variables.
now, that really sounds cool! sadly, I am in a flakey state of affairs and eminently unreliable of late.
This is pretty slick. I like the visual ease of seeing non-standard beat divisions. I can’t think of another sequencer I have that makes it quite this clear, what is going on.
Good work guys. I’m heading over to listen to your album. It is helpful for selling a product when you have solid musicians doing the presentation. It was fun to watch and listen to.
Is this Apple Silicone native, or runs under Rosetta?
Can’t see any compatibility info on their website.
Hey!
Eyal from Modalics here. All our products are Universal Binaries on Mac, so fully native. But – will also run in Rosetta if loaded in a Rosetta host like Pro Tools.
It would be cool to see them add the ability to offset (delay) pizzas by freely rotating them (or typing in a delay value?). Might be useful to have a preference that allows you to choose noon (rather than 6:00) as the start of the beat.
I see in the screenshots that you can assign a value to the pizza like “2|2” or “1|8”. Is it limited to 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, or are 5, 6, 7, 12 in there? It looks like those assignments are for all tracks, and not just a single track. I can understand that this would cause some difficulty to have different beat definitions on each track.
Does the current version let you zoom way in on a single pizza? It could be fun to see some new modes for a given pizza– something like a “bias” (?) amount and curve which would lengthen/shorten steps at the beginning/end of the beat/pizza– to create those ramped events.
BreakTweaker (especially with bundled expansions) has an absolutely stunning sound library. The presets are astoundingly good. The microedit features are fantastic. However, GUI is pretty crude, and the options for step rates just aren’t there. It’s kind of a diamond in the rough. I’m guessing BT (ah, I get it, now!) is abandonware.
It’s all the more reason why Beat Scholar is a most welcome entry in this area. I do hope they find their groove and keep this thing going!!
In the video they illustrate modulating from 4/4 to 7/8 so, I would guess the number of beats per measure can be anything you want it to be. Of course, the note duration (denominator of the fraction) is always going to be absolute divisions of a “whole note”, so there is no such thing as a 7th or 9th note (at least in standard time signatures).
Really what we need is expressions of units that are based on tempo-beats. So you could have units that are of a particular size– as related to the “beat” (as expressed in BPM). And those units could be any fraction– as in: 1 pizza equals X/Y beats (as related to BPM).
Expressing beat values as fractions of a 4-beat unit, where only binary values are permitted is limiting. It doesn’t allow for triplets 1/12 of a whole note, or quintuplets 1/20 of a whole, etc. In other words, if a pizza has to START on a 16th note, then already that’s a big limitation. If all pizza’s (across multiple tracks) are constrained to the same pizza-starting-points, that’s another limitation.
I’m not saying these couldn’t be worked around– (using multiple instances, etc.) but as it is, even the LumBeat iOS apps have pretty similar features (though per beat step rates are 3-8 steps per beat– independent amongst tracks).
But, isn’t what you are proposing already established by time signature in relation to tempo? Also, how would you go about counting something like 13/11 time if you were to adopt such a system? I mean, what would a 11th note actually feel like, in comparison to an 8th or 16th note? I suppose that this kind of thing might work if the only thing you do is work with computer based music. My guess, however, is that if you tried to perform music conceived this way with more than one person contributing (say an actual live performance by a band), the ridiculousness of such a system would become apparent very quickly (-thinking…. “OK boys, lets do this one in 5/11 time.”)
The first point is that comparing all note values to a 4-beat unit is annoying and unnecessary.
The second point is that traditional time-signature have serious musical limitations. Any rhythm structure has to relate to tempo beats (in BPM), so you could have cycles like 7/8 (or 7 steps at 2 steps per beat). But unless the software provides a special exception, you can’t have correct 6/8 (6 steps at 3 steps per beat) because 3 steps per beat would and should actually be called 6/12. Even when software does allow this, it needs a rule that says (of the numerator is 3, 6, 9, 12, … then increase the step rate by 1.5 relative to the beat tempo. But with that you can’t have a time signature like 7/12 (7 steps at 3 steps per beat). Furthermore, limiting denominators to 1, 2, 4, 8, 16… means that your step rates are limited as well– not within the pizzas, but for the placement of the pizzas themselves.
“The first point is that comparing all note values to a 4-beat unit”. Why do you think this? What about an eight beat unit or a 16 beat unit, or even a two or a one beat unit.
“But unless the software provides a special exception, you can’t have correct 6/8 (time?)”. Why not? You have six beats to the bar and for whatever tempo you’re at, you divide total time of the bar into 6 beats (practiced musicians do this subconsciously for the most part). This isn’t exactly rocket science, and most beginning piano students (e.g., 6 year olds) have no problem with this concept. I have no idea what your following sentence even means, but 6/8 is actually the same as 3/4 and the only thing that may change is the tempo, i.e., the duration you are calling the measure length of time and how fast you need to count it. While, for most people, counting to three is easier than counting to six, you can achieve the same thing with either 3/4 or 6/8. At the same tempo you would simply be counting twice as fast for 6/8.
I think it is pretty clear that you don’t fully understand what the numerator and denominator (which is apparently what you think the numbers in an x/y time signature represent in the time signature) actually represent. It seems like you believe that everything has to be evenly divisible by four in a bar of music. You say “Any rhythm structure has to relate to tempo beats (in BPM), so you could have cycles like 7/8 (or 7 steps at 2 steps per beat)”, and I think that is the best demonstration of your confusion. The part of the sentence before the “(” is a statement that may be factual but it doesn’t at all mean what you seem to think it does by what you typed inside the parentheses. What 7/8 time actually means is that there eight units of time (which are arbitrary and based on the tempo so that it takes eight of those units to occupy one full bar (or measure) of time. The seven tells you how the total time that represents a measure is divided into equal subunits that are defined by the tempo (i.e., beats). So we say “seven beats to the measure and the eight note is one beat”. Listen to something that most people not too well versed in odd time signatures actually feel comfortable with, and count along to Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five”. Take Five is written in 5/4 time, that is dividing a measure into five beats where (at whatever tempo specified) the quarter note’s worth of time represents one beat. So, you count it 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2,….” If you count along with the song you will find that the counting seems natural after only a couple bars. That piece is good for this purpose because Dave gives you a few (piano only) bars to settle into the rhythm before Paul Desmond starts playing his sax lead. When the sax starts in, you understand why 5/4 is different than, say, 4/4 time. Seriously, try it some time.
I think I see your point. Yes, the classical music wordings is a bit confusing in that regard.
6/8 is traditionally “heard” like 2 beats per measure with each beat divided to triplets. Which you could call 6/6 if you want to, but for some reason “6/8” stuck better with whoever was deciding on the names for things at the time.
Anyway this is isn’t a musical limitation, more like a “tradition” limitation on how we name things…
As a musician and software creator, what I’m hoping to do is to help you to create all the different rhythm variations you want, regardless of what they’re called. 🙂
“Yes, the classical music wordings is a bit confusing in that regard.
6/8 is traditionally “heard” like 2 beats per measure with each beat divided to triplets. Which you could call 6/6 if you want to, but for some reason “6/8” stuck better with whoever was deciding on the names for things at the time.” Actually, this isn’t true, either. What 6/8 can be heard as is 3/4 at twice the speed if the tempo is constant. There are no “triplets”. There are six beats equally spread across each measure so that each eighth note occupies 1/6 of the total measure duration. You still count it ‘1, 2, 3, 4, ,5, 6, 1, 2, 3… etc. If two consecutive measures contained only six eighth notes, you would hear no rhythm, at all, in the sequence those notes. It could just have easily been four measures of 3/4 played in double time. We call the time signature what it is called because of the number of beats in the bar with timing determined by the duration of the fractional note. So for 6/8 time, that would be the duration of one eighth note of which there can be six in the bar. Because it is done that way, any fractional representation of note length can be achieved among any number of notes. Just as you can represent any integer in binary, you can represent any number of notes and their relative durations with a time signature. Ultimately, this accomplishes the exact thing that stub wants it to.
Yes, you’re right.
I just meant the “traditional” perception of what 6/8 is. If you tell a drummer in a jam session “play in 6/8′ they would very likely play triplets with a back beat, or something in that area. Also many songs that switch between 4/4 and 6/8, like The Beatles ‘We Can Work It Out” are doing it with a switch to triplets.
You can definitely look at 6/8 as “fast” 6/4, which is what people do for example in songs that change between 6/8 and 5/8 or some other straight “feel” time signature.
A good drummer might do that, and it might demonstrate that he/she was actually listening 🙂 The point is, though, any accents the drummer adds by (God shoot me because I find it necessary to use the forbidden word again) retarding one beat and advancing another, doesn’t change the time signature. If a bar the drummer plays doesn’t always have the same total duration (in beats) as what everybody else in the band is playing, things would get out of synch pretty quickly. I understand what you are saying, but I think you are expressing it as a “playing” musician. The concept of “feel” is a pretty complex one, and one that is often impossible to explain to a non-musician.
Manfred Clynes actually gave a name to “feel” and did a number of experiments in which he demonstrated it empirically. The name he gave it was “musical pulse”, and if you examine any two composers work (say, Mozart’s and Beethoven’s music in the same time signature) the thing that allows you to tell whose music you are hearing is determined by the difference in their musical pulses. He showed that this works and that almost everybody has no trouble doing it, but trying to explain (in words) what accounts for those differences is impossible, because the notes all look the same in terms of temporal relationship on the printed staves. Clynes was a master concert pianist and conveyed the ‘pulse’ of the composer because he was able to translate the composer’s ‘pulse’ into his interpretation of the notation. Very few musicians can do near that much with the “feel” of a piece that isn’t their own.
However, no matter how it is divided up, for any given measure in a piece, the measure is of a constant overall duration. So, yes there are limits imposed by musical notation, in general (just play something into an accurately timed sequencer without input quantization and spit back the notation to see obvious examples of this). Even though it may look bizarre, that unedited notation is a much more accurate portrayal of what you had actually played than the prettied up quantized version is. So, it’s not really a limitation of the notation system, it is more of a matter of what we expect in terms of the aesthetics of the final printed music. The fact that a sequencer/notator will do this testifies to the ability of the standard notation system to faithfully encode music as it is being played.
I agree with what you’re saying, but 6/8 is actually a “special case” in musical notation, where even though it “could” refer to the exact musical duration specified in the notes, in many times it doesn’t.
So back to that Beatles song – many sheet music notations would write that song as a 4/4 song with a little bit in 6/8 (the bit with “For fussing and fighting, my friend…”) . Even though what you’re actually hearing in terms of note placement is the song switching to triplets.
Musicians over the years have learned to read it like that, and conductors will conduct 6/8 it as 2/4 with a triplet feel unless it’s specifically required to be different in the score:
https://beststudentviolins.com/TimeSignatures.html#:~:text=6%2F8%20(for%20example),thus%20is%20conducted%20in%20two.
This is not really about “feel”, but really more about where the notes are from an absolute time point of view vs how they’re notated traditionally.
Also, I’m not really going into the areas of quantized vs un-quantized music here, as it’s a world on it’s own. 🙂 Totally staying within the quantized and quantifiable realms for now, especially as whatever we’re talking about here I really need to code back into Beat Scholar. 🙂
Hey! Eyal from Modalics here.
This is an incredible discussion BTW, I’m throughly enjoying all the opinions and ideas – this is really what we’re pushing with Beat Scholar.
If I understand you correctly, you want to be able to divide, say, a whole note, or a 4-bar note into a triplet?
That’s an amazing feature and we’ll have that coming soon in an update. For now the longest unit you can divide is 1/2 note, but we will certainly add all those other ones just as well. Mostly there are some edge cases there that could cause your view to be pretty messed up, because in some of our prototypes you could have an uneven length of circles within a lane, so we’re working on ways to keep it clean or at least give you easy ways to revert if that’s not what you expected.
Huh? This discussion is getting away from my ability to decipher it. I don’t know what a 4-bar note would be, if it weren’t a whole note tied over for an extra three bars. Then, how you would turn that 4-bar drone into a triplet is totally beyond me without resorting to use of some pretty potent psychedelics. Expressing how you would turn a whole note (i.e., a bar) into a “triplet” is pretty straight forward if you want to use a conventional time signature (e.g., 3/4 or 3/8). In both cases, the whole note is divided into three beats and the only thing that would change would be the relationship of the time signature to the tempo (i.e., at 3/8 the bar would have half the total duration of 3/4 time so the notes would occur twice as fast). In pizza-speak you would simply cut the pie into three equal slices and then make the decision on how fast you want to spin it. Or maybe not, and I really do need better drugs.
Doing these kind of long form polyrhythms is actually more common than you think, even though obviously not expressed in traditional notation that way.
For example: if we have 4 bars of 4/4, and you want a “big” triplet on top that, that just means one note every 16 1/8 note triplets.
So that would mean, one note right on the first beat, the second note on the second triplet of the “2” in the second bar, and the last one on the third triplet of “3” in the last bars.
Here’s how I visualize it in Beat Scholar/Pizzas:
https://storage.googleapis.com/modalics-downloads/LongTriplet.png
In traditional notation, it would just mean whole note triplets with ties between. But of course, that’s just a presentation format. Many polyrhythms that go “over the bar” will use similar mechanics: essentially groups of longer notes until the cycle is complete.
Mmm, I posted a reply here and it seems to be gone, so excuse me if it eventually shows up and I posted twice!
Anyway, a triplet over a long note with the duration of 4 whole notes (4 bars of 4/4), is calculated in the same way as calculating a whole note or half note triplets.
In actual musical placements, it means the first note is on the 1, the second note is in the second triplet of the “2” in the second bar, and the last note is in the third triplet of “3” in the third bar. So one note every 16 triplets.
Here’s how I visualize it in Beat Scholar/Pizza land:
https://storage.googleapis.com/modalics-downloads/LongTriplet.png
Similar “over the bar” polyrhythms are calculated in a similar way.
Here’s the citation for the publication of Clynes’ summary of his “musical pulse” research, if anybody is interested. Clynes was a master musician, electronics engineer and neuroscientist, BTW.
Clynes, M., Walker, J. (1982). Neurobiologic Functions of Rhythm, Time, and Pulse in Music. In: Clynes, M. (ed) Music, Mind, and Brain. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-8917-0_10
When developers use traditional time-signature terminology, it makes things needlessly confusing– regardless of one’s theory knowledge– especially with respect to things like odd meters and ternary/triple/compound meters. Traditional time-sigs create some ambiguity about how note values relate to the tempo beats. It is also functionally limiting.
In actual practice our basic unit is the BEAT, and not the whole note. A specific number of BEATS can be grouped into cycles we call MEASURES, and the BEAT can be divided into faster (sub)divisions. Nothing about a 4-beat unit is helpful or even needed.
For more flexibility, we want the ability to have measures that can include fractions of a beat. So for 7/8 we could say 3.5 beats if we are defining an 8th note as half a beat; or 7/8 could have 2.33.. beats if we are defining an 8th note as a 3rd of a beat.
We can generally define relationship between the our sequence’s measure structure and the tempo beats– by saying how many beats per measure, but allowing for fractions. E.g., we could say 6 steps per 2 beats (for a 6/8 framework) or 6 steps per 3 beats (for a 3/4 framework). Or 14 steps per 7 beats (for a traditional 7/8 framework) or 21 steps per 7 beats (for a triplet-based 7/8 framework, which is not nameable with traditional time sigs, but could accurately be called 7/12). All of these define a structure as it relates to the tempo-defined beats. But those 7/8 cases show that defining barlines can be tricky.
As John Rossi clearly understands, the value of the whole note is not fixed. Sometimes a quarter note gets a beat, sometimes a dotted quarter gets a beat, sometimes a half-note gets a beat, etc. etc. Notation readers know to interpret time-signatures based on various customs that are somewhat arbitrary.
The next aspect deals with layering. Technology allows us to layer different time structures (essentially, templates of step rates) across multiple tracks– for polyrhythmic fun. One approach is to choose the over-arching structure that applies to all tracks, and then fudge the polyrhythms with the available tools. Another approach is to allow each track to have its own structure.
There are other non-grid-based aspects like swing, acceleration/deceleration ramps/curves, or other non-grid patterns, that when layered with grid-based rhythms bring even more fun to the party.
Thank you. I can now see what you were telegraphing in that past response. From the developer’s standpoint, couldn’t this easily be accomplished using lanes, allowing each lane to have it’s own timing constructis, with the only caveat being that at some point, the “down beat” occurs in all lanes simultaneously. Isn’t that the way that polyrhythms that are expressed over a number of “bars” would be constructed, anyway?
Ah, thanks for reading. I know it was dense.
Yes, lanes would allow the more polyrhythmic layering.
For the structural aspects, I’m not sure if my aspirations will work in this environment. In order to have more flexible “locations” for each pizzas, perhaps if the grid upon which pizzas are placed, could have some structure that was less time-sig based, and more step-rate based.
Perhaps they’ll be willing to include non-traditional denominators.
Ideally, all step-rates would be expressed in X number of steps per Y number of beats. That allows almost every useful step rate with very little confusion.
Hey everybody!
We just released our 2nd plugin, a melodic/harmonic follow up to Beat Scholar, It’s a pretty unique arpeggiator that lets you map out intricate and highly musical patterns easily and then trigger between them. you can find out more about it below. We’re also giving it away for free for a limited time.
Go to http://www.modalics.com/eon-arp to grab your free copy.
Hope you like it and let us know what you think!
Best,
Or