I would like to propose a new feature, in support of the arranger: the “session recording” mode.
It basically allows you to modify your song in realtime, and record those changes into the arranger’s timeline.
(The arranger is a proposed feature, a separate view that, with a glance, can tell a lot about the song structure. With patterns represented as clips on a timeline, that can be dragged and copied/moved around, sort of like how your average DAW works)
Imagine having a basic 4-pattern song that you really like, and want to create variations from. The way I work, I tend to use track mutes a lot, and jumping from pattern to pattern in realtime (call it live improvisation if you like). With the realtime recording mode, the arranger could store these changes separately from the pattern data, and recreate the changes I made, when playing back the song.
More specifically: There should be two categories of user interactions, destructive and non-destructive. Non-destructive editing is when using track mutes and navigating between patterns (which will tell the arranger that it’s OK to re-use the same pattern), whereas destructive editing means that pattern content was modified in some way, and a new copy of the pattern should be created on-the-fly.
The tricky part is to decide stuff like: when does a pattern end? Is it a fixed pattern length, say 64 or 80, or will the pattern end whenever the “source” material reach one of it’s pattern end-points (and what if the user keeps pressing page-up to repeat the same part over and over again?).
There’s plenty of such pitfalls, but I think this is a really powerful idea and worth thinking about
