So I’m trying to cover the Terminator theme, as an exercise. I’m doing it in 6:8, and everything was running okay - I managed to get the basic drums together by dropping the last 4 steps from the drum loop, then I did the same with the bass, no problem. Then my melody got all jacked up - I’m working from someone’s sheet music and they wrote it up in F# which, whatever, but hey, this is supposed to be work, right?
Then, out of the blue, OP-XY stops counting to 12 and starts counting to 16… sometimes.
I can’t find anything that’s using all 16 steps, so help me. Does anyone have any clever ideas?
Don’t have an answer for the OP-XY time signature wonkiness, but I would do it in F so you only have a Bb instead of all sharps and a B, and then I believe there is a means for the OP-XY to transpose it up a half step to get that brightness that the F# of F# affords. Otherwise it won’t sound right when you are done. I will be watching this thread to see if anybody has an answer for the wonkiness.
I guess that’s happening when you use more than one bar.
When you remove 4 Steps, that means you remove 4 Steps for all bars together and not per bar.
So if you have one bar and remove 4 Steps: easy, it always plays 12 Steps.
But if you have 2 Bars, it will remove 4 Steps for 2 Bars together. So you will have 32-4 steps =28 steps. The first bar will play 16 and the second 12 Steps.
If you want 6/8 and use 2 Bars you need to remove 8 Steps. The first bar will play 16. The second 8. So all in all you have 24 steps.
I hope this makes sense. If not I can try to explain further and yes that is not intuitive 
1 Like
That’s exactly it! Thanks!
It seems like even when every bar of every loop I’m making is set to 12 steps of any of the loops have a second bar then OP-XY will count through 16 steps before moving to the second bar of that loop.
Possible solutions:
A) work only with single-bar loops of 12 steps - they’ll all cycle in sync
B) do math - 64 steps can be divided into:
4 bars of 4:4 (each step is a 16th note, no remainder)
4 bars of 6:8 (each step is an 8th note, 16 step remainder)
2 bars of 6:8 (each step is a 16th note, 16 step remainder)
4 bars of 3:4 (each step is a 16th note, 16 step remainder)
This is really helpful information! Thanks.