Liberate yourself from the temporal tyranny of the 4/4 timeline and quantise grid with these half dozen creative tempo and meter-related concepts. 

Fluctuate the tempo

The tempo track in your DAW is a supremely powerful tool, giving you the ability to manipulate the flow of time throughout a song. While big, obvious changes are often employed as part of the compositional process (halving the tempo for the middle eight, for example), you’d be surprised at the difference a sudden or gradual increase of just a few BPM can make to the energy of a chorus or upward momentum of a pre-drop build, or the anticipation created by a temporary ramping down in the pre-chorus. Of course, we’re talking small, incremental changes – just enough to alter the drive of the track without being overtly apparent – so don’t go beyond 2 or 3bpm unless its to wilfully creative ends.

Map the tempo to a live performance

In some DAWs, the tempo track also gives you the ability to set the moment-to-moment project tempo based on analysis of a live performance – just the thing for bringing a gentle, naturalistic sense of ebb and flow to a project. Record your main rhythmic line – the drums most likely, or perhaps the guitar or piano in a sans-drums track – with or without a click for guidance, then use your DAW’s tempo mapping feature (if it has one) to analyse the part and create a tempo track based on it. This will guide the rest of your recorded and programmed parts, and no matter how good a player you are, the subtle deviations that can’t help but occur in your mapped performance will add an organic, fluid feel that can make all the difference.

For dance music, we wouldn’t recommend playing in the entire drum track, but mapping a live one- or two-bar loop can deliver that slightly off-grid vibe without compromising the all-important predictability and repetition of the beat.

Embrace odd time signatures

Even if you have no interest whatsoever in composing entire tracks in 5/4, 7/8 or anything other than 4/4 (perfectly understandable, especially if you’re making dance music) don’t completely disregard odd time signatures. They can be useful as temporal ‘effects’, switched in for a bar at the end of a phrase in order to throw the groove momentarily, or called on as the basis for polyrhythms (see below). Your DAW will feature a dedicated track or other means for automating time signature changes, making it a cinch to implement them non-destructively, so don’t be afraid to experiment.

Get polyrhythmic

A polyrhythm is the simultaneous use of two or more different time signatures across multiple instrumental elements – drums in 4/4 and bass in 3/4, say, or kick in 4/4, hats in 7/8 and snare in 5/4.

There are two types of polyrhythm: the polymeter and the cross-rhythm. With a cross-rhythm, the bar length is the same for all elements, resulting in each one playing at a different tempo depending on its time signature, thus yielding overall consistency from bar to bar as the downbeats coincide. Polymeter, on the other hand, has every element playing at the same tempo, so that the phrasing constantly shifts with the variable arrival of the downbeats in each part.

Cross-rhythms are great for adding interest and quirkiness to beats and rhythm section grooves, and are easily applied by cutting and extending MIDI or audio parts, then timestretching them to fill the bar length. Polymeter is a little less intuitive to implement in the arrange page, but by no means difficult: just cut each clip to the desired number of beats at the project tempo, then repeat it contiguously. It’s also worth noting that many drum machine plugins (Sonic Charge Microtonic, FXpansion Geist 2, Sugar Bytes DrumComputer et al) enable separate lengths to be specified for each of their sequencer lanes, facilitating easy polymetric programming. Unless you’re working in a particularly cerebral genre (jazz, electronica, etc), though, you’ll probably want to keep the bedrock of the beat (the kick drum and maybe the snare) in 4/4.

Humanise and map the groove

When producing dance or electronic music, the temptation to quantise everything is ever present; but even the most metronomic of styles can benefit greatly from the introduction of a bit of ‘human’ timing imperfection. The most obvious way to imbue a musical part with physical performance authenticity is to play it in live, but programmed MIDI patterns and tempo-synced samples can be loosened up and made to sound more ‘real’ using your DAW’s humanising and groove mapping systems.

The first of these involves controlled offsetting of timing and velocity with a variable degree of randomness, while the second lets you impose the timing and/or dynamics – i.e., the groove – of one MIDI or audio clip onto another. Your DAW will include a library of groove templates based on live performances and classic drum machine swing settings, but the real fun comes in extracting grooves from commercial releases, sampled breakbeats, your own performances, etc. Most pertinently, the carefully calibrated application of groove to a grid-snapped drum pattern can prove transformative without detracting from its essential solidity. 

Displace the beat

Spice up your programmed beats with the drumming technique known as beat displacement. Essentially a very specific form of syncopation, this is the offsetting of an entire drum groove or individual components of it for a bar or two in order to make it sound as if the beat has been briefly knocked off centre. You might, for example, nudge the hi-hats left or right by a 16th-note for a comparatively mild realignment, or shift the kick and snare by an eighth-note for a more befuddling effect. Do keep this sort of manoeuvre short and occasional, though, unless you plan to drive your listeners mad.

What time-bending tricks do you call on in your music making? Let us know in the comments.