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2. Perfecting polyrhythms in Ableton Live

1 The 4:3 polyrhythm is one of the more common polyrhythms. To create one in Live, begin by making a new MIDI clip in a new Live set. Insert a Drum Rack and open the Clip Editor, then enter MIDI Draw mode and place a kick drum on every 1/4-note beat of the bar.

2 This gives us a basic 4/4 beat, over which we’re going to lay down a 3/4 snare pattern. Switch the grid to half-note triplets ( 1/2T), which will display three evenly-spaced grid lines within the bar to act as anchor points. Place a snare drum note on each of these to produce the pattern shown.

3 For any polyrhythm, you can work out where to place the notes on the beat grid in advance, which helps when creating more advanced examples. Say we want to make a 7:4 polyrhythm: to get your grid resolution, multiply the two numbers together, then divide the beat into that number of segments.

4 So, a 7:4 polyrhythm would get 28 segments (7 x 4 = 28). This gives us a bar full of 28 16th-notes which we can subdivide into both seven equal parts and four equal parts. The downbeat goes in the first slot of our grid. We can emphasise this in our DAW with a crash cymbal or similar sonic punctuation.

5 Then, to work out the placement of the beats in our polyrhythm, we can place a kick drum note on every fourth 16th-note beat, and a snare every seventh 16th. This means that kicks fall on beats 1, 5, 9, 13, 17, 21 and 25, while snares happen on beats 1, 8, 15 and 22.

6 In Live, we need to set our clip’s time signature to 28/16 by altering the numbers in the Clip Signature field. If we then transfer the pattern from our grid of 28 slots to the MIDI Editor, we get seven evenly-spaced kick drums and four evenly-spaced snares, all in a single bar – a 7:4 polyrhythm!