Pain Perdu — Hidden LSDJ Tricks EP6: Fantastic Grooves and How to Use Them (video, 2016)

The episode that reframes lsdj's time: TEMPO is not BPM. "What actually governs the structure of your song is not the tempo setting, it's grooves. What tempo does is govern the clock speed and the tick rate."

Key claims#

• The hourglass. A tick is "the lowest possible unit of time in a given LSDj project … comparable to the sample rate or the resolution of your track". Picture the song as an hourglass: tempo says how fast the grains fall, "but grooves say how many of them will be in each note". He proves it by holding TEMPO at 255 and changing only the grooves — the music speeds up, slows down and changes feel.
• A phrase step is not a 16th note. "These are steps, these are not necessarily sixteenth notes; this is not necessarily a bar." A 16-step phrase is one bar only at groove 6; at groove C it is half a bar, at groove 3 it is two.
• Naming convention: groove 1 = 1 tick, groove 2 = 2 ticks, and so on, "for easier navigation … so that I know that if I'm in groove C I have twelve ticks". (The same convention hypnogram uses — see shuffle-funktempo.)
• One number is enough if the speed is constant: a groove of 6 alone wraps and repeats; the second field is only needed for a repeating pattern of step lengths.
• A groove is a per-step tempo map. He writes 12 6 12 6 6 6 2 3 to show it — "two long notes, two short notes, two long notes, two four notes …" — and notes you can go "completely crazy and put 1 6 3 4 F A whatever, but this wouldn't be very musical … if you want to make experimental stuff with grooves you totally can".
• Grooves are per channel, which is the trick most of the episode rests on: pulse 1 in groove 3 next to the wave channel in groove 6. "Always keep track of your total" — four phrases at groove 6 and eight at groove 3 last the same time, "so at the end of the day they still sing together".
• The common settings: 6 for 16ths at the displayed tempo, 3 for 32nds and faster phrases, and 7 5 or 4 8 for swing — "this is a longer note and your shorter notes".
• Triplets: double the tempo and the groove together (tempo 265, groove C = 12) to stay at the same BPM with a finer grid, then run a channel at groove 8 — "divide 12 by 3, that makes 4, times 2 makes 8" — for eighth-note triplets. A ternary bar has 12 steps, not 16, so an H hop ends the phrase in the right place.
• Grooves work in tables, and this is the part he flags as little known: "by default tables run at one tick per step", and a G command inside a table sets its speed instead. It halves the space a slow arpeggio costs — "if I wanted to make a long arp that actually took two tables to make, that was a bit of a hassle; thanks to that trick I can now use half the space and control exactly how fast my tables go" — and a faster groove lets a percussion table pack more commands into the same time. Credited to "Joe Toye from Chiptune Belgium".
• A workflow consequence: with per-channel grooves, arpeggios can live in phrases instead of tables — "if you're like me and you overuse tables for arps, using grooves and phrases might be a better idea".

Practical takeaways#

• Set the feel with grooves and leave TEMPO to set the resolution; a fast tempo with a long groove is the same BPM with more room to place things.
• Keep the tick totals equal when channels run different grooves, or they drift apart.
• G inside a table is the table's speed control — cheaper than writing slow arps twice.

Notable quotes#

"Tempo has nothing to do with BPM. It should, but it turns out it doesn't."

"Grooves say how many of them will be in each note."

Relevance to the wiki#

shuffle-funktempo had the swing values and Hypnogram's naming convention; this adds why the tempo field is not BPM, per-channel grooves with matched totals, triplets, and G as a table speed control.

To verify#

• The triplet arithmetic (tempo 265, groove C, channel at groove 8) is reconstructed from an auto transcript of a screen demonstration; the relationship is sound but the exact numbers are unverified.

Pages touched#

shuffle-funktempo · rhythm-and-groove · instrument-tables · chord-arpeggio · tracking-workflow · lsdj · pain-perdu