Break the Grid: Evolving Grooves with Polymetric Looping

If you’ve ever sat in front of a step sequencer, you know the familiar comfort of the 16-step grid. It’s the foundation of house, techno, hip-hop, and countless other genres. But that comfort can quickly turn into a creative prison. When every track in your project starts at step 1 and loops back at step 16, your music can start sounding stiff, predictable, and mechanical.

To break out of the 16-step loop, producers traditionally had to write long, tedious 64-bar arrangements to keep things fresh.

We wanted a better, more immediate way to inject life into your tracks. That’s why we built Polymetric Looping (independent track loop lengths) into the closeby.1 sequencer. You can now set each track to loop at its own step boundary—letting you create hypnotic, evolving polyrhythms and rolling melodies with just a few clicks.

What is Polymetric Looping?

Normally, a sequencer locks all tracks to a global length (like 16 steps for 1 bar).

With Polymetric Looping, we decouple the loop length of each individual track. You can keep your kick drum locked to a solid 16-step loop, but set your percussion to loop every 15 steps, and your bassline to loop every 7 steps.

Because the tracks have different loop lengths, their patterns naturally slide against one another on every cycle. Your bass melody will accent different beats of your kick drum on the second bar, and different ones again on the third. The result is a rolling, shifting groove that feels constantly alive, only repeating its exact start alignment after hundreds of steps.

How to Set Up Polymetric Loops in closeby.1

Setting up independent loop lengths is simple and non-destructive:

Select Your Track: Click on the track you want to adjust in the Left Sidebar.
Find the Loop controls: Look at the Right Sidebar under the page length selector. You’ll find the new LOOP LEN stepper panel.
Change the Step Length: Click the - and + buttons to set your custom step length (for example, 13 / 16).
Visual Loop Boundaries: Look at the main sequencer grid. Steps that fall outside your loop boundary (e.g., steps 13 through 15) will immediately dim and show dashed borders. These steps are bypassed during playback, and the playhead will jump back to step 1 as soon as it reaches the end of your custom loop.
Deduplicated Automation: This visual dimming automatically syncs down to your MIDI CC Automation tracks as well, so you always know exactly which steps are streaming modulation to your hardware synths.

[!TIP] Changing loop length is completely non-destructive. If you shrink your loop to 5 steps to experiment, and later change it back to 16, all the notes you originally wrote on steps 5-15 are preserved and will start playing again!

3 Creative Ways to Compose with Polymetric Looping

Ready to test this out with your hardware synths? Here are three creative setups to try:

1. The Rolling Techno Bassline

Set your Kick drum track to a standard 16 steps.
Set your Bassline track (e.g., routed to your Moog Minitaur on CC 19) to 7 steps or 14 steps and write a simple three-note motif.
Press play. The bass melody will constantly rotate relative to the kick, creating a driving, hypnotic rolling bass groove popular in psytrance and techno.

2. Shifting Percussion Accents

Write a standard 16-step clap and hi-hat pattern.
Add a rimshot or conga track and set its loop length to 5 steps. Place a single note on step 3.
The percussion accent will land on step 3, then step 8, then step 13, shifting rhythmically across your 4/4 drum beat and making a simple drum loop sound complex and syncopated.

3. Evolving Ambient Melodies

Program a 16-step chord progression on a polyphonic pad synth.
Set an arpeggiator track routed to a lead synth (like a Roland Boutique JX-08) to 13 steps.
As the arpeggiated lead loops every 13 steps against the 16-step chord changes, the arpeggio notes will play over different chords on every pass, creating a shifting, shimmering ambient melody that never feels static.

Wrap Up

Polymetric Looping is one of the most powerful tools in a hardware-focused workflow. It turns short, simple patterns into endless, evolving soundscapes.

Load up the sequencer, map your hardware, and start experimenting with different step lengths. You might be surprised at the grooves you discover!