I bought an SP-404 about a month ago, and I'm loving it!! Sooner or later I'll post my tracks for you all to critique. Anyway, quick question....

Is there an easy way to program patterns in odd time? The settings let you choose the number of bars in a pattern, but is there a way to program 5, 7, 9 (etc) beats per measure instead of the default 4?

Thanks!!

i dont think you can. to get around it you gotta do some funky shit- like turn down the bpm, turn off the metronome, and fit your shit into that bar. its a pain in the ass

I agree, best bet is to lay it down live. no quantize is your friend when you want a weird time signature on a beat.

i remember coming up with a wierd time signiture that worked perfect quantized at 16. i forget the tempo and how many bars.

hey there, i know this is obvious, but you could just sample stuff from records in weird signatures. so, rather than building the beat using the sequencer, just glaum a sample in 5/4 and loop that.

then if you layer other samples on top in 4/4 (for example) you can make them line up (i think) every 20 beats. you'll have to work at it, of course, because they won't be locked to anything and there'll be some "slippage", but you can do it.

and as others have said, you could also just lay stuff down in real time.

I would make the pattern go for X bars of 4/4 until it syncs up. This is a bit of a pain in the arse for me too, as I seem to write everything in 3's or 6's instead of nice 4's.

I'm necroing a post here, and very new to the sp404 (got it a week ago)

But I've been using resampling to do odd time signatures, far easier than trying to play over a fixed bar