Advice re workflow

Elektron Gear Analog Keys/Four
1

Hi, I could do with some advice re workflow on the A4. Just added the A4 to my setup a week ago and getting to grips with it (maybe). I have an octatrack and have a reasonable grasp of how to start and save each new “song” I want to work on.
The A4 has a different heirarchy that I find a little non-intuitive.
If I am correct the A4 allows 16 songs each of which can have 128 patterns.
I usually start a new “song” by starting a new pattern and creating a new kit around it, then saving the kit and the pattern. Then I go about deconstructing and re-constructing the pattern and saving the changes as new patterns, and then linking them together in a song. (I would do this on the octatrack at the level of a project)
It just seems strange that for a synth with so much memory in the +drive that I can only save 16 songs. What happens when I want to have more songs? Do I do a sysex dump and save everything , then start again?
If this is the case can I in the future have a whole bunch of songs saved as sysex files on my laptop and then dump individual songs back to the A4 so that I could have a set for live use? I am worried that I might not get all the patterns and kits and sounds dumped back with the song. Does this make sense?

Cheers
Slyde

2

If I’m correct, what you describe is 1 project. You can have 128 projects. The beginning pages of the manual have some graphs about the tree structure behind projects, banks, patterns, songs etc.

3

No sorry, the Octatrack has projects, the A4 has Songs. There are only 16 of them Page 7 of the manual.

4

Aha, found my problem, I have an older manual for an older OS. The online pdf has a new project structure. Makes a bit more sense now. See if I can get to grips with it.
Cheers

5

In that case I may have a different manual. My A4 pdf manual has an image at page 7, which has at the highest level of the tree “128 projects”. Also I have used them, so they’re not completely imaginary…

Edit: Ok, good :slight_smile:

6

The A4 indeed has ‘projects’, and you can build 16 songs in any project.

I use the Octatrack as my main sequencer and it only has 8 ‘arrangements’ for each project, but the arranger is a bit more powerful in it’s feature set.