now for the real question, how to do 5/4 timing with just groove? or without groove. i guess keep you can either use H command after beat 1 of phrase 2, or forget beats per phrase and just use 5 phrases for 4 bars of 5. not as elegant though.

I think the best way to do that would just to split it up into 3/4 then 2/4. So a H on C and another in the next phrase at 8. It would keep it a lot cleaner I think.

it seems you are talking about 2 different things here, time signature vs. groove.

Sorry if it was seeming like I was talking about two different things. What I was originally trying to do was have a song go from 4/4 to 3/4 and at the time I was thinking that I could change the number of ticks played in the phrases that where set to 3/4, with having the result of shortening the phrase.

After a while of digging for info on groove, I couldn't really find anything that had a decent detailed explanation of what groove is and how it works. I'm just kind of left being a bit of confused on how it work. Is there anything that shows how it works systematically in whatever they use to program LSDj or  gives a good explanation of how it works in a general idea? I would really like to learn in depth how groove works, like the math behind it and such.

What I ended up doing instead was putting a H command on line C in every phrase and keeping the groove at the default 6/6. My head can process that better then trying to use 3 phrases. Mainly because you kind of lost me with this bit here (12 16th notes x 4 bars = 48 lines; beat 1 of bar 2 starts on line 0C of the first phrase, etc).

I seen that as well but when I tried to use it the kits that I had layered in the WAV channel would sound a bit off from each other for some reason.

had to do some digging to find this tweet again https://twitter.com/chrislpenner/status … 8603077633

Disadvantage to that technique is that if you add a pickup/anacrusis it'll throw that scheme off.

and a H on C making it twelve nicely in time hits whilst other phrases are in normal 16ths

Then just leave every fourth note of a phrase empty. Simple

had to do some digging to find this tweet again https://twitter.com/chrislpenner/status … 8603077633

this is a pretty cool trick

Yeah, I'm also confused.  Messing with groove affects swing, but you're talking about time signatures?  Just use the H command and make life easy.

This. Also you can use Groove like you would the F cmnd in Famitracker, to control the speed, which is generally what I do. but yeah just use H in your phrase for 3/4 time, so much easier.

it seems you are talking about 2 different things here, time signature vs. groove - first you want to know if you can do 3/4 without H. well sure, keep groove set to 6/6 and just use 3 phrases for every 4 bars instead of 4 (12 16th notes x 4 bars = 48 lines; beat 1 of bar 2 starts on line 0C of the first phrase, etc). however this won't make it as easy to remember which bar of the song you are sequencing, and if you're not careful it might cause your chains to come out of sync.

forgot about this workaround, i used to do this in nanoloop back when you couldn't change pattern length

changing the groove changes how many ticks each line in each phrase plays for. it won't change what time signature you are writing in, it will only change the feel of the time signature. you could still write a song in 4/4 with a groove set to 7/5, 8/5, 8/4, etc. around 66% swing it will sound more like 12/8 than 4/4 (or 9/8 than 3/4).

either way, say if you are writing in 3/4 with a 6/6 groove but you want to write eighth note triplets, you'll either A. need to use D commands to get your notes to play on the right subdivisons (6 ticks x 4 lines = 24 ticks, 24/3 is 8, so to get 8 ticks per note you would need a D02 on the second note and a D04 on the third) or B. use G to switch to a different groove set to 8/8/8 and then switch back.