PO Pollies

Yes my design. I have a Teenage Engineering PO-33 K.O! and it has been a huge creative bolster for my music. But I’ve found that one of the most limiting things about the device, is how tethered you are to this 4by4 grid of 16 beats. You can luck into something funky-timewise with the ‘6-8’ effect. You can get syncopated by cranking that swing knob, but there’s no way to loop a phrase at beat “12”. However, there is pattern chaining, which allows you to chain together up to 16 patterns into one continuous sequence. The PO KO has 16- 16 beat patterns for a total of 256 beats. Pattern chaining is what allows us to resolve polyrhythms on the pocket operator at bizarre beat totals. It takes 15 patterns for a 3:5 polyrhythm to resolve on a pocket operator. You can build it with your pocket operator by chaining together 15 patterns. The pulse will trigger every 3 beats and the counter pulse every 5 beats. Of course, having to count each beat out and remember which beat you’re on as you carry over into new patterns is hard and monotonous. Here is a link to a program I built to help visualize polyrhythms on a pocket operator. The visualization conforms the polyrhythm to a 4by4 grid. It then draws the polyrhythm out until the pulse and counterpulse resolve on beat 1 of a 16 beat pattern of the pocket operator. The program accepts two inputs, a pulse and a counter pulse. It shows you a standard visualization of the resulting polyrhythm of x rows of y numbers, where x is the pulse and y is the counterpulse. More interestingly though, is that it will also show you what the polyrhythm will look like on a pocket operator. In addition, it will tell you how many 16-beat patterns it will take to resolve on the device. Follow the guide to build your polyrhythm on your pocket operator and turn it into . . . music?