After working on Mini Metro, I was inspired to convert the basic idea of its music system into a MIDI plugin. That opened a floodgate of ideas and so I’ve been making lots of scripts in Logic over the last few months … I’ve been taking little clips here and there and thought I’d share some of what I’ve been working on !
This fell into my hands many years ago from an unknown source, and I made it look pretty and put it up at a permanent link: http://bit.ly/metricmodcalc. This spreadsheet is an excellent resource if you’re interested in experimenting with metric modulation in your music. You can hear the effect in some of my tunes, like Wagering Lights at ~2:03, and Jump Error at ~3:10. You'll have to make a personal copy of the spreadsheet in order to use it.
This morsel is in 4/4 time.
The ride cymbal plays continuous sextuplets. The kick drum plays a four bar phrase, made up of alternating eighth note pairs and eighth note triplets.
The sextuplets played by the drummer on the ride cymbal create the sound of a 3:4 polyrhythm. This means that in the time it takes to sound 4 notes of equal distance to each other, 3 notes of equal distance to each other sound as well.
The 3:4 polyrhythm often exists where 4 is the number of quarter notes, yet this example uses eighth notes. As a result, the drummer manages to fit two instances of the polyrhythm in each bar.
Music Morsels are musical fragments, collected and analyzed.
This rhythmic delay technique is commonly associated with The Edge. The guitar plays 8th notes, while the wet signal from a delay unit is set to (roughly) a dotted eighth note, creating the illusion that a note is being performed every 16th note. After two notes are played, the spaces between each note played are filled with copies of the second to last note played. By doing this, you can play very sophisticated sounding arpeggiations, or play something twice as fast with half the effort.
Music Morsels are musical fragments, collected and analyzed.