It’s nice inside the world of 4/4; you get steady rhythms and a natural foundation for electronic music. If you dare to venture outside those safe confines, there’s a world of alternate grooves and interesting polyrhythms. Let’s watch as Omri Cohen uses VCV Rack to approach the technique of patching different time signatures in modular.
The video starts out with some foundational concepts: clock divisions/multiplications, clock resolution, beats, measures, note values, and meters. Technically, a time signature provides the framework for organizing the rhythms in your composition, and this video gives you a lot more tools to make a lot more rhythms.
As always, Omri doesn’t just talk, he shows with some patches: one in 5/4 and another that switched between 4/4 and 7/8. Both patches are having fun with percussion, the 7/8 switch is an especially interesting patch technique.
Although not modular, we though it would be fun to include Rick Beato’s 20 favorite odd meter songs for some popular examples of time signature changes.
Don’t forget to check out Omri’s excellent courses teaching modular synthesis. Happy patching!
