Elektron Musical Instruments

didn't somebody mention setting up a system for saving and
categorizing all of the Machinedrum suggestions? that would still be a
good idea... (hint, hint :-)

anyway, I was thinking about someone's suggestion from awhile ago -
the idea of song-oriented sequencing.  more specifically, I think it
would be great to allow parameter locks on a song-level rather than
just at a pattern level. to me, this is one of the main things setting
the MD apart from software sequencers. for example, if you want the
hi-hat decay to go up for one beat of the entire song then the only
way to program that is to use song mode and dedicate a track which
will be trigged for the measure the beat lies in (and never used
again).  but that's a waste of a track that could be used for another
sound, to me.

I know that Daniel shot down the song-sequencing idea, citing the very
good point that it would be too difficult to edit the song. but I have
an idea for this (that I hope is worth considering). first off,
though, my idea is just to incorporate song-level parameter locks
overtop of already existing patterns that the song is sequencing (i.e.
no new step trigs). and to edit these locks, the song editing would be
expanded as follows: for a given song step, press "enter" while the
pattern name on that step is highlighted. this would bring up the
pattern edit window (with some notation so that one knows this is
different from the normal pattern edit mode) where one could edit the
parameter locks associated with the pattern on that song step.

the only confusing aspect of this editing would be distinguishing a
normal pattern parameter lock from a song parameter lock. this could
be done as follows: instead of the whole box colors being inverted
with the value displayed (as with normal parameter locks), the box
colors would be as normal with the value displayed and the parameter
label colors inverted.

this implementation might be a bad idea (or impossible), but I think
that song-oriented sequencing is something that should be considered
for a future OS.  that is, if it's within the scope of the machine to
store such information, etc.

so what are the users' opinions?

Joe.