Time signature wonkiness

OP-XY
1

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?

2

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.

3

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 :slight_smile:

2 Likes
4

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)

5

This is really helpful information! Thanks.

6

I can’t try it myself atm, is this still how it works? Using two bars with 12 step lengths gets ”converted” to one 16 step bar and one eight step bar?

side note, I read somewhere that Brad F in hindsight couldn’t really account for the exact signatures etc of the original arrangement

7

This is really helpful for me (new to op-xy). What I understand from this is that (to avoid confusion) you should only remove steps from the last Bar.

Rick

8

I’ve always wondered why they haven’t fixed this, or made it so changing the time signature automatically adjusts each bar’s length accordingly. I’m guessing it’s because adjusting the step count would mess things up, but they could at least give us a setting we can turn on for people who don’t adjust the step count.

9

It kind of feels like both issues come from the same place. Changing the time signature does not actually adjust the bars, and changing step length just ends up affecting the end of the pattern. In both cases, the bars themselves are not really being handled in a musical way.