What to do when beats move on repetition?

#1

Suppose I have a conventional drum pattern, with some things in quarter notes, and some in eighth notes.

Now I want to insert a dotted quarter note, for example, for the kick drum. I can make the note length a dotted quarter note, of course, but because that note does not go evenly into 8 or 16, it does not come out in the same place each rotation.

Suppose I make the circle 5 steps of a dotted eighth note. That comes up to 15 steps, everything else is 16 steps and so it is off. Similarly 6 steps comes out to 18 steps.

Am I missing some obvious way to do this? A solution would be to make the pattern in 8th notes, put in three of them, and then tell Patterning to play that as one note. Is that possible?

I am just tryinig to reproduce some traditional Latin patterns that call for this.

Thanks for any help.

#2

In this case, I’d recommend not using the dotted 8th note as the step duration… I’d just think about where the attacks of the notes are, and not worry about the durations - they are percussive sounds, so the duration doesn’t matter.

So if you wanted a “dotted 8th” pattern, use 16th notes and then place attacks on every third step.
1 _ _ 4 _ _ 7 _ _ etc.

Does that make sense?