I bought an Arturia DrumBrute Impact recently, and I love it. I am using it mainly for acoustic guitar practise, but will eventually also use it for recording. I have been slowly remaking/recreating all the beats I use from the freeware Sennheiser/Neumann DrumMicA Kontakt instrument into the Impact. So far so good, for most of the patterns which are in 4/4, but I am having trouble getting my head around the couple of patterns I use which are in 3/4 or 6/8. In the drum machine sequencer, which has 16 steps, which should be the final step, for example, in 6/8? Or do I need to set the Impact’s sequencer to one of the other step division types? It has 1/8, 1/8T, 1/16 (the standard), 1/16T and 1/32. Patterns can be any number of steps between 1 and 64.
Happy to upload the MIDI file of the 6/8 pattern I am trying to replicate, if anyone thinks it would help.
Thanks in advance for any replies, and the warm welcome I have had here over the last few days, I really do like it here!
Im not familier with the drum brute, but I’ve been doing odd meters on the beat step pro for years. The key is to be able to set the number of steps per pattern to something else than 16, 32, 48 and 64…
So for 6/8 you’d need 6 steps for a bar, often it’s nicer to have more than one bar in a pattern, so 4x6=24 steps would be four bars.
7/8 would be 4x7=28 steps.
On the beatstep the 64 available steps are arranged as four sets of 16. So if you do 6/8 with 24 steps, the downbeat of every bar is on different locations on the 16 pads. Does that make sense? Or am I totally misunderstanding what that question was?
No this is brilliant, thank you so much, definitely helping me to get my head around it!
Yes, on the Impact you can set the maximum length of patterns to 16, 32, 48, or 64, (4 sets of 16, must be much like your Beatstep) BUT you can also set the whole pattern to loop anywhere within those number of steps (and individually for each drum sound for poly-rhythms if you like, but that’s another topic entirely!)
So I will give it a go for the 6/8 pattern at 4 bars = 24 steps, and see how I get on. I just have to remember the “beat lines” set at every 4 steps on the fascia will not be telling me anything useful.
My original sampled loop in Kontakt was 72 bpm, which threw me to begin with, because my programmed loop sounded completely different on the Impact. Doubling the Impact’s tempo to 144 bpm made it sound the same. Yay! Has given me confidence to attempt the other non 4/4 patterns as well.
Sounds like you’re well on your way, but I just wanted to point out that for time signature based on groups of three beats, changing the step divisions to triplets might make what you call the beat lines on the Impact make more sense visually?
That’s a good point, might make the BPM correspond with my original Impact loops too. But I think I am on my way, as you say. Gonna have a crack at some 3/4 tomorrow. These 3 tyope time signatures are used a lot on Folk music, almost as common as 4/4, which is mainly what I am playing at the moment.
