Scenario
You are working on a combi, program, or song, and some of the KARMA GEs you are trying to use feel too fast or too slow for the tempo you are at. Or perhaps you're manually playing in a time signature that differs from the time signatures used by the various GEs in your KARMA performance, so the length of the "measures" in the GEs don't match up with the time signature that you're playing.
What controls the "speed and time signature" of what a GE plays?
First, a review of how music must be broken down for KARMA to understand it
When a human plays a riff or rhythmic phrase, we think of it as comprising only the notes or chords that we play and the timing or "feel" or rhythm of the notes or chords. After all, a music staff shows only which notes and the key of the song or song section, the time value of the notes, and a time signature for the song or song section.
When a computer algorithm like KARMA is going to emulate all this, we need to break it down into much more granular pieces so we can tell KARMA exactly what to do with each piece. Part of the learning curve for KARMA is learning what all these pieces do and how they interact. In KARMA, these "pieces" are called groups:
- Note Series group - The trigger or input notes/chords that you play are analyzed for chord recognition and therefore also for what key the input notes are from, and an appropriate Note Series is created. Every note in the Note Series is called an index. The Note Series might comprise only the specific input notes that you played, or it might be an extrapolation of the input notes that could be transposed or otherwise fit into specific scalar or modal series. You can even apply filters to remove certain scale tones from the final set of indexes, such as removing all 3rds from the Note Series used for the GE in the performance that plays a bass pattern, and removing all 7ths from the Note Series in the GE that plays a guitar comping riff.
In the set of 32 GE real-time parameters (GE RTP) exposed in your keyboard model, all parameters from the Note Series group start with Note Series: more coming soon: wikidot was being buggy when I had time to work on this
- Other parameters of the Note Series groups might then filter the resulting set of indexes such that only a certain range of the indexes are used by the GE, which is called the playback portion more coming soon: wikidot was being buggy when I had time to work on this
Second, let's look closer at the "speed and time signature" portion of all this
Rhythm group interacts with the Phase group and Note Series group more coming soon: wikidot was being buggy when I had time to work on this
Procedure for both Korg OASYS and Korg M3
There are two methods you can use to experiment with changing the time signature:
1. Changing the time signature in the GE, using GE RTP
The table links below list the time signature in each of the two Phases of a GE. Since the GE list is different between the M3 and the OASYS, please use the table for your keyboard.
If the GE has a changeable Time Signature or number of Events, you can find the GE RTP that is connected to the parameter, and vary it from the GE RTP Page:
- Korg M3: Program Mode: Page 7-2-1; Combi/Song Mode: Page 7-3-5/6/7/8.
- Korg OASYS: Page 7-5.
2. Changing the overall KARMA Time Signature
You can also experiment with the overall KARMA Time Signature to change the time signature, stored in each Program/Combi/Song, which produces different results than doing it in the GE RTP. Note that this changes it (or tries to) for all modules in use at the same time.
- Korg M3: This is located at the top of the KARMA GE Page 0-5.
- Korg OASYS: This is located at the top of the KARMA GE Page 0-6 and GE Setup 7-1.