I often end up having an endless amount of patterns at the end of my songs, that are not actual song data, but patterns containing different weird or lame ideas, alternate intros or endings, different tests/breaks/stuff, lots of MIDI data/notes for external synths that has been recorded to audio but that I don’t want to delete in case I need to go back… etc etc… you get the picture.
And sometimes the amount of such patterns can get really ugly, and it’s bothersome at the mixdown stage when I forget to check “render only selected patterns”.
What I would love to see:
EDIT: better suggestions for a solution have been brought to the table in this thread An " Insert Toolbox" button/context-menu option, that would allow me to move all these patterns into a folder-like container, that I could open/close when needed. This “toolbox” could be positioned somewhere after the last actual song data pattern, and is NOT included neither in the song playback (unless you move down to it and hit play) or song rendering.
no, that’s what i usually do
but i am kinda tired of it, it takes up a lot of visual space (think 100+ patterns), and want to properly PART it from the actual song data, also from rendering and full song playback
I often end up having an endless amount of patterns at the end of my songs
It’s funny, because I think that’s how a lot of people do this. 100+ patterns is probably a bit more than the average though
I find it funny sometime to take a song with a lot of random stuff at the end, and then play those patterns from end to start (triggering the patterns in reverse order).
Definitely would like to see something like this - I’ve previously talked about having a “swap screen” for the matrix - inspired by good old DeluxePaint, a famous drawing program on the Amiga which had this sort of thing.
It would simply be a separate place to store random patterns and sketches, like you pointed out.
But it could potentially be more than just that…I also have been thinking about a way that this swap screen could act as a “triggerbox” - essentially being a full-fledged renoise song, but with the additional ability to trigger matrix slots independently of each other.
This would be a rather simple way to facilitate the kind of non-linear workflow that we love in Live/Bitwig. But of course, in order to record this into a linear time you would need something that could store and visualize those things…And this could bring us into “proper arranger” territory, so I’ll just stop before going totally off-topic
Danoise, this idea looks very promising! Thanks for sharing with us!
But how would this look in the pattern list and the pattern sequencer - could they have a similiar type of separator, to clearly differ the “real” song data from the alternate patterns,
and could everything in the alternate matrix/alternate patterns be excluded when rendering the full song? That would be great.
how would this look in the pattern list and the pattern sequencer - could they have a similiar type of separator, to clearly differ the “real” song data from the alternate patterns,
Yes, I would imagine that the split would be effective across the pattern sequence / matrix. It would work the same without the matrix being visible, but you would of course lose the ability to copy individual slots…
And yes, the topmost part would still be the main song, the one getting rendered when rendering the song. But you would also be able to play the lower part, even render out stems
(if you look closely at the screenshot, you’ll notice that the patterns in the lower part are dimmed - but if playback was moved here, I believe the upper patterns should get dimmed instead)
Got me thinking…this idea could really open a new kind of workflow
One of the things I currently find kind of hard is to keep track of my aliased slots, sometimes I’m not careful enough and delete one of the “source” slots.
But with this little box, I could just stick these notes in there and let them be aliased into the main song.
I could even clear the song and not worry about losing those notes, they would still be there unless you choose to clear everything
I think if we have pattern matrix we need more funktion for this windows. Need one window or maybe merge with pattern window (pattern matrix its just small visualisition, pattern huge mode) and ithink in pattern matrix do it editor for cut/shift/merge etc for simple edit patterns
1: This is the button which toggle the overall visibility of the alternate matrix
2: You can drag/copy patterns between screens (the patterns are completely separate, pattern 1 in the top isn’t the same as pattern 1 below)
3: Similarly, you can drag/copy individual slots between the two screens.
4: The split itself is adjustable by grabbing the horizontal divider with the mouse
@00.1 Totally agree, we need to bring phrases “closer to the pattern”. This is worthy of a separate discussion, I think
Good suggestion, although I’d prefer the “Pattern Toolbox/Pool/Whatever” to be more of a parallel display - at least if you’re satisfied with the overall arrangement and just want to try out different melodies (and in different segments of the song), meaning that the Pool will “follow” no matter where in the song you are. Perhaps you could toggle to a horizontal display if you want to try out a completely new arrangement? Or perhaps I just misunderstood your points.
Thinking of that you liked the idea to have the Pattern Matrix on top of the Pattern Editor in another thread, here’s how I’d roughly imagine it to look like. And to leave some space for the PE and PM the “Quick Mix View” is preferably on the far left rather than on the bottom:
Good suggestion, although I’d prefer the “Pattern Toolbox/Pool/Whatever” to be more of a parallel display - at least if you’re satisfied with the overall arrangement and just want to try out different melodies (and in different segments of the song)
Ah, I missed this one… I envisioned the pattern pool as being special in two ways:
It exists outside the song.
Removing elements from the song will not remove them from the pool.
So you can add important motifs, riffs or alternative arrangements etc. to the pool for “safe keeping”.
Tracks, groups and FX still apply.
The pattern pool isn’t just about pattern data, it is pattern data stored within a specific context: track FX / group, etc.
Because of point #2, the pattern pool would not function side-by-side with a vertical pattern matrix, like in the screenshot you posted.
You would basically struggle to see the relationship between tracks - sideways scanning would make your head dizzy.
If you take a look at your screenshot - in the pool,which track does the green slots belong to?
This would be infinitely easier to determine if they were sitting beneath, but in the same column.
(of course, we could then hope for a matrix which can be flipped between horizontal and vertical…but yeah. )
To have truly independant pattern data we have phrase presets, they are awesome once you start amassing a huge collection
Ah, I missed this one… I envisioned the pattern pool as being special in two ways:
It exists outside the song.
Removing elements from the song will not remove them from the pool.
So you can add important motifs, riffs or alternative arrangements etc. to the pool for “safe keeping”.
Tracks, groups and FX still apply.
The pattern pool isn’t just about pattern data, it is pattern data stored within a specific context: track FX / group, etc.
Because of point #2, the pattern pool would not function side-by-side with a vertical pattern matrix, like in the screenshot you posted.
You would basically struggle to see the relationship between tracks - sideways scanning would make your head dizzy.
If you take a look at your screenshot - in the pool,which track does the green slots belong to?
This would be infinitely easier to determine if they were sitting beneath, but in the same column.
(of course, we could then hope for a matrix which can be flipped between horizontal and vertical…but yeah. )
To have truly independant pattern data we have phrase presets, they are awesome once you start amassing a huge collection
This is not the most important feature for me, but I’m a little curious of it. My previous post was more spontaneous thoughts about how it could look like.
Perhaps the green slots are simply just assigned to a track in the main window. I’m not sure how it could look in a better way if I want to test different melodies in different parts of the song? I have no doubt that you or the devs have a clearly better idea though.
