Analogue-sequencer

>>Try doing set length abs<<

it worked. I don't know why it didn't work when I first selected it, 
but it works now.
anyone else finding the new aux selection pages a bit tricky? seems 
to take me quite a while & any number of "func+aux" to get 
from "cc#1" to "inter track" to "aux note" to "aux note abs". I think 
I may in future do a lot of the aux setups in advance, into empty 
patterns. I have gravitated towards using certain tracks for certain 
things- percussion here, chords here & so forth.
the crystal change, new cpu & software load all happened painlessly 
last week in the rehearsal room; I was able to load beta 26 & a load 
of patterns from my yamaha data-filer. now, ironically & for the 
first time, my two p3's are in the same room. terrible gear failures, 
I've had.....

were any of you at HJ4 on saturday? you might have noticed that I 
wasn't paying the p3 much attention during the gig. this was because, 
about ten minutes into our soundcheck, our proteus module decided to 
pack up. so I had to reprogramme... try to extract near-equivalent 
timbres from an alesis s4+, & hope it didn't run out of polyphony. 
great box, the s4... very under-rated, but we still lost a lot of 
functionality. 
the proteus' power supply turned out to be fried, probably 
condensation from being in the van all night. 
right after this, we also lost our power-amp & so had to rely on the 
supplied monitoring system instead of our own. ours is louder. this 
is probably why, at the end of our set, the house PA started making 
horrible noises...
but we muddled through. gave the vostok a little run too.

I had a closer look at the schrittmacher too (three of them). nice 
display & encoders, but it makes you realise how spoilt we are with 
the p3's extended functionality, not to mention v.f.m. 
I read the schritt's manual again just now- it seems to be a sort of 
uber-maq. one could imagine quite easily running out of ways to 
generate data for an even moderately complex arrangement, whereas my 
p3 often has two or three whole tracks lying idle because the active 
racks are doing so much. you could run a small orchestral arrangement 
from a p3....

I've found that I'm using a whole set of a track's patterns to store 
a sequence with more complex timing requirements & a lot of notes. 
so there'll be two tracks set to the same midi channel: the active 
part controls which set of 8 patterns is actually playing. 

this works ok but I'd quite like the freedom to allocate a bank's 
patterns (64, in my current config) freely amongst the tracks. 
I might, for instance, always use track 1 in live-input mode, while 
track 8 is playing some long chord/note sequence that needs all 8 
patterns because of the resolution. this means a chunk of memory is 
unused & unusable in this arrangement.

here's something else that would be really useful: I have been 
programming a lot of chord sequences into the p3. this is a bit 
laborious since it involves setting up the auxes (see above) & then 
entering the 2nds, 3rd & even 4ths for each chord. 

I know colin mentioned being able (one day) to capture chords 
straight into the auxes: how would this work? put the lowest note 
into the note-step & then write the next highest into each aux in 
turn? 
would the auxes have to be pre-armed to expect notes? would 
temporarily disabling the corresponding aux/step "protect" a note 
from being overwritten?

but how about, in the meantime, being able to copy/paste from another 
pattern straight into an aux that's been set up to play notes? would 
that be simpler to implement &/or operate?

so one would record the root notes into a pattern, then on another 
track /on the same channel/ record a pattern with the 2nds, then the 
3rds, & so on..... then paste these patterns into the auxes alongside 
the original root notes. & then, of course, the other tracks are free 
again, to be used on another channel.

nagle (if he's out there, if anyone's out there....) will probably 
tell us that there's already a way to do this, by getting an aux to 
grab notes from another track... but doesn't this push the grabbed 
values onto the main note steps, rather than the aux notes?

enough. back to work.

d/r.m.i.