(This article consists out of seven parts) 

Mountain Man's recent query about sequencer resets and Rob Hordijk's answer have made me realize that I might be pursuing my researches into African polyrhythms the wrong way. Attached is a very simple patch that tries to establish a fundamental method/general framework in which I would like to operate while approaching the issue of using the Nord to represent African polyrhythms.

We often learn these rhythms, as children, by 'saying' them. The different parts within any one polyrhythm are given nonsense syllables of one kind or another. A complete rhythm is then known by the sequence of such syllables it throws up.

The attached patch uses an event sequencer to represent a classic and very well-known rhythm from the Ewe who live largely in the Eastern part of my native Ghana (West Africa). With the great cultural/urban mixing taking place these days many others, inside and outside Africa, have heard and adopted it.

The is a 2-instrument rhythm usually written in 12/8 time. It acts as the backdrop for a wide variety of dances, chants, social occasions and the like. Played more quickly, it can be a celebration dance. Played more slowly, it can be the accompaniment to somebody's keening in a funeral dirge.

The high instrument, frequently a bell, or else the right hand, plays the following pattern:

It is learned by reciting the rhythm of the 'Go's' (pronounced more like 'Ga').

The low instrument, drum, foot stomp, left-hand, plays follwing:

(Pronouned more like 'jee').

The two coincide on beats 1 and 10. By convention, the lower pattern voicing wins. Resultant (i.e. rhythm of both) is nonsense sequence:

If you click either loop button on either the 'Western Loop' or 'African Loop' event sequencers you will hear this very basic rhythm. Western musicians tend to 'take it from the top' so beginning on first beat. An African, however, starts on second beat of lower/lowest pattern. Since beat 2 is here blank first anyone hears is 'Go' of beat three. That is to say, any given pattern tends to regard the first note of some other pattern not as the place to begin, but as the place to end. That is to say, the resultant ends on the first beat of the bell's 'Go' pattern ... meaning that it has its proper beginning upon the second beat. Thus the resultant rightly ends on the Dzi that begins the pattern. The remainder of what is in fact the last cycle is left unplayed so that anyone else who wants to play it simply picks up what the last person to play left behind them.

I've tried programming a couple of basic polyrhythms and, to be honest, them not finishing properly on the first beat of the next cycle left me a mite confomfortable. Programming sequencers so they started on the second beat and finished on the first beat also didn't cut it. It was vaguely acceptable with this simple rhythm, but not with more complex resultants. But ... I have tried programming sequencers and then letting my wife and children do a blind 'Western' and 'African' pattern test at random to see hear if I can really hear the difference. But I'm afraid that, in the end, it's like starting a tune on the wrong note. Yes ... logic tells me that once the thing is looping away it makes not the slightest difference what was going on when it started. But ... I can't escape thinking 'God, these Westerners really suck at rhythms' whenever it doesn't begin right; and thinking 'wow, really tight groove here', when it does start right. I accept that this might be entirely imaginary and personal, but I would still like to resolve a basic Nord programming issue.

I would like to be able incorporate both approaches into a given patch so that anyone else who wants to can, at any time, do an A/B comparison. With 4, 5, 6 and more voices I think anyone at all would hear these differences. However, since they are mostly considerably easier to learn and recognize in the start on Beat 1 style, I would like to have that available.

What I have tried, and so far failed, to do is:

1. Give this choice. I would like a dedicated knob that would switch from one style to the other while allowing any rhythm currently in progress to finish in orderly fashion before switching to the other. I have represented these as the two stacks of event sequencers entitled 'Western' and 'African' in the patch.
2. The top event seq in each stack tries to represent the two alternative beginnings. All beats have simply been displaced by 4 so that the pattern ends on Beat 16 ready to allow a transition to the event seq underneath -- which could then be looped. The 'African' stack has GoDzi beginning in the much more natural -- or at least accepted -- way on beat 2 of GoDzi (which is blank). I have given the two stacks identical looping seqs.
3. Then there is the question of ending -- the coda. How can I allow for an arbitrary number of loops yet so that when an event sequencer is unlooped (Knobs 2 and 3) we run straight into the ending pattern of a finalizing event sequencer?. In the Western GoDzi pattern, obviously, this is nothing at all. But frequently, in the African case, there would be some kind of special finishing flourish.

I have tried a variety of logic modules, compare functions, anding and oring and other such strategies. I have tried substituting LFO's for clock modules. So far, nothing seems to work properly. Although my interest is African polyrhythms, there is a broader general principle. All this surely is is a specific representation of a standard ABC song form. The Nord can surely handle this?

But ... I am particularly asking to be able to switch between two such ABC songs in the same patch at the turn of a knob so that they can be compared. I am also asking to be able to repeat or loop the B section arbitrarily before ultimately taking the song out in an order fashion through its C section -- and at the turn of another knob. And yet ... whenever either song starts it starts right at the beginning, in the A section, before hitting the B section which it plays once and goes through to C unless looped, otherwise it loops until going to C.

I have looked at a few songs others have provided ... and I have not yet seen anyone do this. I have not been able to do it myself. I regret that I deleted the few attempts I made, but none of them were able to initiate that third coda event sequencer at the same time as the loop function on the second was switched off. Also, since in this particular case the loop is only 12 steps long, how am I to jump to any third sequence without losing any time at all?

Can something like this be of any use? Start the sequence by turning ClkGen1 on, it is nowhere flexible of course... and it costs a lot...

I am glad, actually, that your immediate reaction is that it is not so easy ...!!! Makes me feel a little less incapable. Truth is I am hoping that finding a way to make the rhythms flow in a nice groove will make it easier to create the percussion sounds. That way I will be hearing/trying to create them in context.

Very clever. It might work you know!! For at least part of what I want to do.

May sound like I'm joking around, but if you always start on the second beat, why isn't it called the first beat? And couldn't you just shift the beats in the sequencer to fix this?

Actually .... you raise a very interesting point. There is no logical answer to this.

As to shifting the beats in the sequencer, the problem is issuing instructions to the sequencer to start on a given beat, to loop, and then to finish on another. Both the GoDzi and the adowa, which I have just submitted an example of, are very simple rhythms for which this would "work". However, there are other beats, which I shall submit shortly, for which this just "won't work".

I put the "won't work" in inverted commas, because, in the end, this is an aesthetic thing. I can't defend it logically so I won't try. I can always retort by asking a different question: When are those who read and write Hebrew, Japanese and other such languages going to learn to write "in the right direction"?

It may seem rather off the point, but I remember reading an interview with Paul McCartney once about Penny Lane. As a songwriter I was very interested in what he said. Penny Lane took shape one night after he and John had heard the English Chamber Orchestra playing one of the Bach Brandenburg Concertos on TV. They mentioed to George Martin that they had heard a 'very interesting sound' on TV the night before and described it. George Martin identified it immediately; they got hold of the ECO's piccolo trumpet player; and Penny Lane was born. I must say that my enjoyment of that song incresed markedly -- and I am quite sure that right now you can hear that part in your head. I also remember reading an interview with Eric Clapton and being impressed, actually, that he knew the names of many of the old and great blues masters, and that he had actually made the effort to get to know them and play their stuff 'au naturel'. All I'm saying here is that a little knowledge, and a little effort, can add greatly both to the attempt to make music and the attempt to enjoy it. It rather seems to me, from the response I've had, that people aren't just 'enjoying' discovering these polyrhythms, but also something about the background in which they occur. As a songwriter, I identify it as the kind of 'knowledge' that went into Penny Lane; and that inspired Lennon and McCartney to compose a Beethoven string quartets called 'Yesterday' and 'Michelle'

It's just an irrational thing ... but people who are busy making the effort to make music together are very unlikely to be busy preoccupying themselves with making war. This is obviously very romanticized given the number of internecine wars and conflicts there are within Africa ... never mind outside.

Let me put it this way. I remember going to an African music concert once when my daughter was just under two years old. She started crying and I had the immediate 'Western' reaction of scooping her up in my arms and rushing out the auditorium so that she would not be a disturbance to others ... who had all paid good money for their concert. Then one of the singers in the group stopped singing, shouted out, and said 'where do you think you are taking that baby?' She instructed me to return to my seat and sit.

If I had been at a 'concert' in Africa it would never have occurred to me to have such a reaction. Music is, essentially, a participatory thing. 'Going to a concert' has already virtually defined music as occupying some kind of separated arena of life, with the concert being the 'event' at which that separation is being especially noted.

But ... music is a part of life. Just as babies are a part of life. Is it not ridiculous to rush a baby as far away from music as possible? Babies learn music by being there, bouncing on our laps, asleep or awake, when music is played, and by being bounced about on our backs while we are dancing -- be they again asleep or awake. They fall asleep to music and wake up to music and if they cry while music is being played then so what? Is not music there to be used and to nurture us when we feel like crying? And is it not still waiting for us when we are happy again? As many people who have been to an African music concert will testify, 'concert' is a bit of a misnomer for the social experience that music is intended to convey (traditionally) in African life. This is not just 'stuff for listening to'. It is participatory.

As for this matter of the first and second beat, the best I can describe it is to say that anyone who has something to say, or who feels something, is entitled to 'pick up' a song or a rhythm any time they feel like it and to start playing it and playing with it. But ... whatever they do or say while playing or singing, they are definitely not alone. They live in Our Village. If they are happy then the rest of the Village should come to know that someone is happy -- and we all join our singing to their singing and we show that we are happy for them. And if someone in the Village has become so sad that they feel a need to sing a song or bang a drum about it then we should all feel for them and share with them. We should assure them that we sympathise ... and that they are definitely not alone. Everybody in the Village is here playing and we are all playing and singing along.

When someone wants to start then they start they start on the second beat because that beat is theirs. That is the way they tell us that they need and want our company and our sympathy, or else that they want to tell us something. Our job is to 'be there for them' as the Yanks put it. The first beat ... it does not 'belong' to anybody. The first belongs to everybody -- and nobody should ever be left be playing it by themselves. As for the other beats, you are free to do what you like.

But as you move from the second beat onwards ... before the first beat comes around you will certainly have the company of all the people in your Village. And ... when you at last feel like ending your song because you have said everything you need to say then you will end upon the first beat as a way of showing that you have been so adequately supported that there is nothing else you want to say ... especially alone. The first beat belongs to everybody ... and nobody should be left alone to play another one alone.

Sorry ... but that's the best answer I can give. Nothing at all rational about it, I fear. Just a load of romanticized twaddle!!

 My intellectual self accepts, completely, the point that you are making because it is, after all, just a sequencer module. But ... luckily ... music is more than intellect and sequencer modules. We begin upon the second beat. We end upon the first. That's just the way it is.

Actually, the way you just described it, it makes perfect sense. Not irrational twaddle at all!

I think this discussion gives a perfect example of how important context is for music, and how music can serve so many functions in life. Why else would people like us put so much importance in something that is just a bunch of sounds strung together :-)