Analogue-sequencer

I had this mad idea last night (whilst watching the very excellent
portico quartet do their stuff in the union chapel in islington)....

you know how you can switch parts & have the mutes stay as they are,
or follow whatever is set up in the new part?

I'd like to be able to switch to a new part but have some of the
/tracks/ carry on playing what they are playing from the previous part.

in my hypothesis, one would achieve this by holding down the track
buttons for the tracks one wanted to keep going, whilst selecting the
new part.
reselecting the new part would introduce the new part's patterns for
these tracks. one could perhaps change the tracks from the "old"
pattern to the "new" pattern one at a time using this method.

there would need to be some way to indicate which patterns were active
from each part- maybe the part indicators could flash alternately..

obviously, the same effect can be achieved by simply copying or
ghosting patterns/bars amongst parts, but one needs to plan this in
advance & what I want to do is be a little more spontaneous than that.
 

I am really liking the v4 software now, & have it & the mem-x in both
machines. btw, the older machine (the RGB one with no sides on it) had
the main proc. board nearer the front of the case & so I had to do a
little metal-bending to get the mem-x to fit. no biggy, but a caveat
for other early-adopters, perhaps.

something I couldn't figure out- I have a track with several short
arpeggio bars one after the other. I can get the bars to repeat as
many or as few times as I want by using the reps count, but the last
bar just keeps looping around when what I want is for it to play up to
it's rep count & then go back to the first bar. I'm guessing this is a
global bar count thing, but I couldn't disable it.
what's the quickest way to get each track to loop around independently
of the others, i.e. based purely on it's own bar lengths, rep counts &
so forth? I'm quite happy to do the maths myself when I want two
tracks to last the same number of bars.... paul?

ah, one last thing- does anyone else feel that the midi-mixer controls
are in the wrong place now (v4)? I keep reaching for the knobs above
the track buttons.... wouldn't that make more sense?

d.

> -----Original Message-----
> Subject: [analogue-sequencer] part-change holdover 
> enhancement? & stuff

> you know how you can switch parts & have the mutes stay as they are,
> or follow whatever is set up in the new part?
> 
> I'd like to be able to switch to a new part but have some of the
> /tracks/ carry on playing what they are playing from the 
> previous part.

I'd like to do that too. I'd also like to be able to preview what's in a
part before I select it, and various other tricks.
But I don't think it can be crammed into the P3 UI very elegantly.
So these things tend to be added to the 'P4 TBI list' (which, after being
sidelined by another project, is moving along again).

> in my hypothesis, one would achieve this by holding down the track
> buttons for the tracks one wanted to keep going, whilst selecting the
> new part.

How many fingers have you got, dude ? ;-)
If you want 7 out of 8 tracks to carry on playing from the first part, and
you want to switch one track to part 8, you may need to get your nose
involved.
I can see how it might be made to work, but it would require some finger
gymnastics.

> something I couldn't figure out- I have a track with several short
> arpeggio bars one after the other. I can get the bars to repeat as
> many or as few times as I want by using the reps count, but the last
> bar just keeps looping around when what I want is for it to play up to
> it's rep count & then go back to the first bar.

Could there be a bar loop set up there ?
Or GbH ?

> ah, one last thing- does anyone else feel that the midi-mixer controls
> are in the wrong place now (v4)? I keep reaching for the knobs above
> the track buttons.... wouldn't that make more sense?

The MIDI mixer was added after knob grabbing events, so I felt it would be
more backward-compatible to keep the mixer controls away from knobs that may
already have been configured for events.
I suppose you do have to manually enable the MIDI mixer, so maybe there
isn't really a conflict.

Best regards,
Colin Fraser
Sequentix Music Systems Ltd
http://www.sequentix.com

>>How many fingers have you got, dude ? ;-)
If you want 7 out of 8 tracks to carry on playing from the first part,
and you want to switch one track to part 8, you may need to get your
nose involved. I can see how it might be made to work, but it would
require some finger gymnastics.<<

seriously? 
then you'd have to work around not being able to "carry over" more
than five tracks.... actually I tried just now & I could comfortably
push seven buttons at once with one hand... more than that wouldn't
make sense, obviously... I appreciate that kit-blokes might have
different hardware, & that not everyone has got bassist's finger-ends.


unseriously?
as fer finger-gym, I already have to use my nose to clear the entire
memory, don't I, smart-arse? :-) last time out, I started to perform
this routine in front of astonished band-mates... gave up, taped down
the step key instead....

(btw, it's a good idea to do this right after installing mem-x. I
thought the machine would be empty & it stunned everyone by playing
something it had written whilst asleep, under-the-knife, so to speak.
it was shite, mind, but it was still stunning.)


remind me, what's the UI problem? does something else happen if you
hold track buttons down while changing parts?

>>Could there be a bar loop set up there ?
Or GbH ?<<

yeah, I tried hitting it, didn't work. :-)

or did you mean GHB? 8-/


>>The MIDI mixer was added after knob grabbing events....<<

hmmm... & while we still had playlisted parts too. I remember. but at
the moment, it's causing me problems. I don't relate the part buttons
to midi channels so much as, well... "parts" of a composition, or
"setups" for an improv. the tracks, on the other hand, are locked to a
set of midi channels, & I frequently use the track buttons to drop
patterns in & out of the piece (in MMT8 style), as I suspect a few
folks do. can we have a show of hands?
 
besides this, the knob-grabbing action can be freely assigned across
the 8 tracks, with no obvious correlation between a physical knob &
any adjacent switchgear.... I think we need a show of hands. 

paul, what do you think? is this going to mess with y'r head too much?

while we're at it- is there any way the controller values (7 & 11, I
think) could be editable? I like the volume control, but sometimes I'd
rather have a free controller instead of the pan in the midi mixer.
I'm the first one to admit that I was against this midi-control
surface use of the p3 way back when it first came up, but only idiots
refuse to change their minds or adapt.... :-)

d.

duncan wrote:

> paul, what do you think? is this going to mess with y'r head too much?

Messing with my head is what I do for fun. But actually I have had 
designs on the "track" knobs' default functions, leaving the existing 
mixer as is. I do find that amazingly handy. I'd love to see the track 
knobs doing accumulator abs setting - the top knob doing vel and D and 
the lower knob doing note accumulator. That would be an ace trick and if 
you assigned any track knob using an aux event it'd magically replace 
tat default behaviour. I'm not sure this one has impressed Colin yet 
though. :)

> while we're at it- is there any way the controller values (7 & 11, I
> think) could be editable? I like the volume control, but sometimes I'd
> rather have a free controller instead of the pan in the midi mixer.
> I'm the first one to admit that I was against this midi-control
> surface use of the p3 way back when it first came up, but only idiots
> refuse to change their minds or adapt.... :-)

I know what you mean, I change my mind regularly. Or do I? Sorry. There 
are times I'd definitely sacrifice pan for mod wheel sure but I'm pretty 
darn happy with the mixer. Darn, darn happy.

Love & peace & stuff

-- 
Paul
---
"Effectus super absolutionem"
http://www.JointIntelligenceCommittee.com
http://www.myspace.com/jointintelligencecommittee