tsig 4/4?

what exactly does this do? if anyone feels like sharing please let me know..

it means there are 4 beats to a measure, and a quarter note gets a beat.

2/4 would mean there are 2 beats to a measure and a quarter note gets a beat.

7/8 means there are seven beats to a measure, and an 8th note gets a beat.


so if your mp is set to 4/4 and you have the quantize set to 1/8 then record with note repeat, you will get 8 hits per bar. that make sense?

um a little...don't wanna sound ignorant but how does it become useful? can u give an example of how it would be used.

well its a music convention . . . so the difference between say 4/4 and 4/8 is a bit subtle, but with respect to the mpc, it counts in bars,beats,and ticks.

so if you understand the time sig and quantize, you'll always know where you're at in a measure. it helps alot in step programming.

like if you're in step mode with the quantize set to 1/8 every step is an 8th note. so with the time sig you know how many 8th notes per bar.

i dont know if itsa obvious but if you take a quarter note - a half note is two quarters long, a whole note is four quarters, an eighth note is exactly half a quarter note, and a sixteenth is half an eight and so on down to 64th notes is about as small as it normally goes. these values are all relative to each other because:

bpm sets the absolute length of your notes.

and once you know your **** then you can say something like play all the sixteenth notes and accent the offbeats or whatever. convenient shorthand....

thanks man. but your still speaking a foreign language sorta. if you can speak really simply i would appreciate it...thanks

its hard to get simpler. jumping into musi theory can be overwhelming - the only thing i can say is you have to start by keeping a bunch of things in your head at once - rythm, melody, timing, chords, scales - but trust me one day you realize its all very simple and its all the same thing. you just cant put it all together until you have the whole thing in your mind.

but for now, heres some ideas.

turn on your mpc, hit record and overdub and listen to the click. the mpc starts automatically set to a 2 bar loop, at 120 bpm, in 4/4 time. so you will hear 8 clicks, four per bar. each click denotes a quarter note.

try changing the tempo from 120 to whatever you want. this is changing the length of a quarter note.

also notice the numbers at the top right of the screen. say the number reads 02:02:48. that means you are on bar two, quarter note two, and 48 ticks in. the mpc divides a quarter note into 96 ticks (this is called the timing resolution - with quantize turned off, a step will be 1/96th of a quarter note - so you can put sounds rather precisely anywhere in a sequence if you need to) so that 48 means you are halfway between beat 2 and beat three in the second bar. You are on a sixteenth note!

try counting out the beat. for two bars of 4/4 count 1,2,3,4,2,2,3,4 . . . the count should land on the click and give a little emphasis to the numbers in bold. they are the 1's - and they are the most important. james brown famously told his band "i dont care what you do as long as you hit that one!" it gets really important when you have, like, a 16 bar loop - because the 1 on the first bar is like home base. you wanna hear it slam right in. your music can go all over the place but you always come home on the one.

(digression - what makes it sixteen bars is that you dont feel it repeating until every 16 bars. 4 reps of a 4 bar loop still feels like just that (4 reps), but if you have like a long keyboard melody you might end up with a 16 bar feel even if your drums repeat. basically, listen to some music and try to feel when that big 1 comes along - it takes a bit of listening at first but it soon becomes second nature, and its important) -

then you can try counting like this:

1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 2 and 2 and 3 and 4. same deal - the numbers land on the clicks. now you are counting 8th notes.

and you can even go "1 e and a 2 e and a 3 e and a 4 e and a 2 e and etcetera". thats your 16th notes. at this point you'll realize why people dont usually count 32nd notes- cause your mouth dont work that fast!

then maybe try making a sequence. put a kick drum on the ones , the a's, and the threes, put a snare on the 2's and fours, and a hihat on all the ands. this might be a good exercise for you, as you may need to translate your count into beats and measures. if you do it right you'll have a simple little rap beat (try setting the bpms to like 98-100) and he fact that i could tell you to make that beat without hearing it speaks a bit on why you want to know your way around tsig.

p.s. any errors is because i aint near my mpc right now or cause im a dumbass some times

yo thanks man! u really opened something up for me fo real. i got it, kinda. the only thinng is, when would u change the tsig....b4 you start your sequence or after? theirs gotta be a way to really utilize it?

again thanks!!

on the mpc if you change the sig after you started the beat it will either add blank beats to each bar, or truncate each bar. it can be a good thing once you know what your doing, but not as important at first. so really the mpc kinda thinks you're going to choose your time signature before you compose.

for now just stiick with 4/4, or you can try 3/4 too (thats waltz time signature - count oom pah pah, oom pah pah). but the reason i say work with 4/4 is that the vast majority of western music is in that time. people just like fours.

but theres also the try everything and mess around approach and thats good too. it cant hurt to try to mess with 7/4, just dont expect much until you know exactly what youre doing.

tru. how do take a track loop you like, say the melody, and put it on top of another drum beat in another sequence? this might be asking a littl e much..

as you can tell im not doing much right now:

you can transfer tracks between sequences.

on the main screen hit EDIT

its a bit tricky but possibly self explanatory. you can select what track you want (make sure to select the whole range - ie 1:01:01 to the end) on the right, and where you want it to go on the left. if you are copying to a track that already has sounds on it you will need to think about whether you want to REPLACE or MERGE.

hopefully thats enough for you to go on. its harder to explain than it is to do.

and if the tsig and tempo on the two sequences are wildly different you may experience difficulty, and want to think about just trying to program your idea out.

wicked wicked!! ok cuz i need to mix it up a bit in song mode....u can't make it too repetitive right? cool. any other tricks you would like to share with an old friend?

hehe.... good info there Bidi... i know a lil bit, but you just dropped some ish on me... the way you explained it helped me understand a lil more on the theory side of things... i havent been checkin the newbie forum much at all, but imma keep my eyes open for it a lil more now!

hehe, Good lookin on your post... i think imma read that ish again...