Hello All,
So. I just purchased an SP 404 and am pretty hype on it so far. But. One concern I have is about recording patterns in an odd meter. It seems to me that I can adjust the amount of measures a pattern will be by pressing the length button. But then it will always be four beats per measure. Suppose I wanted to do seven beats per measure or three beats per measure. Is there a way to change the number of beats per measure? Trying to figure this out is giving me one of the top ten big head aches. And also, I'd think anyone that responded with some advice was great.
Thanks!

i dont know much about times , but i think you can trick it into 3 beats with using 8.3 or 16.3 .

Right, I had tried that before. It's of course really frustrating to do and, beyond that, that solution only makes it so I can record a 3/4 pattern (and this 3/4 pattern will be at a different tempo than any other 4/4 pattern in the same bank because of the way the measure is being divided). But I can't seem to find out a way to record a pattern with say 7 or 5 beats per measure. I'd be really surprised if Roland only anticipated people making patterns in 4/4. Does anybody have other suggestions?

i havent tried it but i remember reading someone had said you can make it 5 lengths and then just turn the tempo way up and then the beginning of every bar will just be a count

i dont really think theres another way

the trick is in some math bullshit, say you want 3/4 at a tempo, so make a pattern length 3 measures and you'll have 4 bars of 3/4 time, each starting at 1.1, 1.4, 2.3, and 2.2, you can do that shit with any time signature over 4, just figure out how many measures you need before it would evenly match up with, i'm pretty sure it works out so that 7/4 would take 7 measures, 5/4 would take 5 measures, and so on like that

Yeah, that was also a strategy I'd fooled around with. I found that doing that has a bunch of significant drawbacks, though. Among the many drawbacks for me is that this technique makes metric variation really difficult and sometimes impossible. In a song of mine (written before I had the sp), I have a section that has a measure of seven, followed by a measure of six, followed by two measures of seven, and then the whole thing repeats a few times. Doing this type of pattern is impossible it seems because the total number of beats of this section is 27, but once the pattern measure length exceeds 20, you can only go up in 4 measure intervals, and so 27 is not divisible by 4, twice that is 54 (not divisible by 4), and three times is 81 (not divisible by 4). This seems to make this beat impossible to do with a pattern (I don't want to do it through a sample because a. it wouldn't be quantized, b. I can't trigger a sample with a tap tempo, which is something I want to do in a live setting).

So anyway, this whole thing is really frustrating for me. Basically, what I was looking for when getting the 404 was a machine where I could do the following:
1. Enter my own sounds into pads.
2. Use the sounds stored in these pads to make patterns of any beat length.
3. Have these patterns saved in easily "triggerable" pads.
4. Use a tap tempo to set the tempo of these patterns so as to be able to start playing these patterns at the same tempo that the rest of my band has already started playing at in live settings.

So that's mostly what I'm looking for, and the metric issue with the 404 is really holding me up. Can anybody suggest a machine that might better serve my purposes?

Thanks so much! ... and sorry for the long message.

3/4 measures:

Patternsize: 3bars (makes 4x 3/4bars cause 3/4 x 4 = 3)

========
o=click
B asedrum
S nare

Oooo Oooo Oooo
BBSB BSBB SBBS

Ignore the beeps while recording and you're done.

Points 1-4 should work great with the 404! (beside the tempo change of samples...) Just take your time with it.

I always have the length at 3 bars when I make waltzes.

last night i was making a beat and tempo kept saying 4 bpm ,

so i ignored that , and ignored the beeper , and everything worked nice.

Yeah, waltzes, mang
You'll see in my next album

Goddamn, people have more quotes in their sigs from me than they do from frickin' Shakespear.