Pressing Enter to play a pattern step by step works for regular notes entered in the pattern, however an instrument playing a phrase (via a Zxx ) will play the phrase at the current tempo, and not at the pace of Enter presses.
Further presses of Enter seem to retrigger active phrases.
Possibly related - the Global Groove settings are effective on regular notes entered in the pattern, but completely ignored by any phrases in the pattern, much like above.
Steps to reproduce:
Load or create an instrument with a phrase.
Use the phrase on a row of a clear pattern.
Press Enter on the trigger line, and on lines after the trigger, and;
Select the Mst track, enable Global Groove with all bars at 50% (or at least non zero).
Expected results:
Phrases single step at the appropriate offset from the trigger note, as if it were present as regular notes.
Phrases play with the same Global Groove as regular notes.
Actual results:
Phrases play at the regular tempo, ignoring step by step and Global Groove.
Thanks for your reply! I think I’ll avoid phrases in the future. They are a bit awkward in a few other ways, but seemed better than pasting duplicates into patterns.
It does look like shuffle is sort of what I want, but I’d need to modify every phrase individually.
Would you appreciate a separate feature request post?
Can you elaborate, might be good suggestions for improvements? Personally I wouldn’t mind some kind of visualization in the pattern editor wherever phrases are used. See the note events from the phrase, but in a way there is a clear distinction between normal events and phrases.
I initially found confusing the interaction between the phrase setting of Program or Off per instrument, which one was currently selected in the instrument, and what played in a pattern.
I’d naturally hit the usual playback keys in the phrase editor and the song plays instead (which is perhaps ok, and a habit I had to break).
It took me longer than I expected to track down the Znn command for phrase choice because this pagehttp://tutorials.renoise.com/wiki/Phrase_Editor doesn’t mention the Z command, and seems very MIDI focused.
Reading through the Pattern Matrix suggests I can use Aliases instead, but a transposed alias would help even more. Perhaps there’s some way I can discover an effect I can use to automate transposition…
I agree that the pattern editor could visualize the phrases better;
Tinting column cells where phrases will play (would illustrate where a regular instrument trigger stops a phrase, too).
Showing the notes themselves, which is tricky considering they can have different LPB or groove.
A different kind of track for sequencing phrases.
Another small push towards Pattern Matrix aliases is of course the instrument-centric nature of phrases. Ultimately I’m looking for a way to share common refrains and beats, which can easily involve a number of instruments.
I’ll be trying those out instead, assuming that they won’t suffer from step by step and global groove issues.