Hi,

I normally drive my patches in PD from one metronome, have counters selected to that metronome and select the rhythms I want from that.

What would be a good way to link up more than one metronome, and be able to have them operating at different tempos, yet still synched up? So a 2nd metronome is playing tuplets of the beat of the first metronome. I really want to get rhythms more interesting than multiples of 2s and 3s. And possibly have metronomes at different, but related tempos to get polyrhythms like 2 against 3 or 3 against 5.

I made a little test patch to get tuplets, but I think It can be tighter. I am using BPM, but I wonder if I should make some kind of converter to sample accuracy to make it a lot tighter.

tuplets.pd

@nicnut Possibly every two rhythms can have a common metro that counts to the least common multiple of the number of beats of each rhythm and each rhythm would just take the beat that is divisible by that number.

I made an attempt to build this. It actually just uses the product instead the least common multiple, so there is room for optimization.

polyrhythm-metro.pd

Here the number n of each rhythm means: Play at each nth beat of the common beat. That is why 2 is faster than 4.

Hi ingox,

This solution you came up with is really genius. It took me awhile to wrap my head around this. But I realized what you did is how I would approach it if I had to play two rhythms on an instrument. Find the common rhythmic value (16th note, 8th note triplet, etc) and then do groupings of the each of the 2 rhythms. Doing it this way you can have everything coming off one metronome, so it's way tighter.

I had to add a sound for the common rhythmic value so I could hear the rhythmic relationship between the groupings. I added a 3rd rhythm too, just to see what would happen. You are right , there is a lot of room for optimization. My variation is not so clean, but here it is if anyone wants to look.

polyrhythms3.pd

@nicnut I've been checking out lyonpotpourri's samm~ lately, it seems to do exactly what you want (though they run at signal-rate, and you can't change the tuplets)

he also has dmach~ which is a sequencer-thing with sequenced "tuplets"

@nicnut Yes, and i think it should be possible to use just one [metro] for three or more beats. I have to admit that i wasn't able to wrap my head around this completely. I just found something that kind of works and it was enough to present the basic idea here.

But the real idea would be a [metro] that plays with higher speed at a rate that somehow is based on the least common multiple of the beats involved. Then each beat would take out the bangs of this stream that are relevant to it.

In the proposal above i did some kind of trick, as i used the smaller number to get to a default speed.

So the mathematics still do not cover the full idea. Maybe someone else could see this and maybe offer a solution.

@nicnut also I have some objects [subdivide] and [metorate] that might work for this
especially subdivide: takes a bang and just outputs a counter at some multiple of the bang (metro) frequency

Hey seb-harmonik.ar, this subdivide object is pretty cool. I had to install the ekext library to get it to work as well. Amazing how this works. I think there is something similar in Automatism that I sometimes use.

I think between this subdivide object and the modulo method off one metronome I can get what I am imagining in terms of poly rhythms. Thank you both for the input.

If i make a crazy poly rhythm patch I'll post it here.

@nicnut
Maybe interesting........?

etc.........

@whale-av

oh my god! ha ha. i have a lot of homework to do.