So in another forum a question came up regarding this video:
at ca. 1:14, Cenk brings in a slow bass, with its three notes being 32 steps each, so the bassline repeats every 96 steps. It looks like he’s in one pattern, no chain or song mode. So how does this work?
I’ve tried to reconstruct this, and one possibility (the only one I have found) was to use the arp as follows:
- in a default empty pattern with length 16
- Place one single trig on step one of a track. Let’s call this trig the ARP TRIG.
- for this trig, on the note page, set LEN = INF, NOT = F4
- on the arp page, MOD = anything other than OFF, SPD = 96 (equals to 16 steps per note), RNG = 1, LEN = INF
- set the arp pattern like this:
the offsets are 0, 4, 2 for the three active steps.
with arp speed set to 96, the arp pattern advances one step every for every 16 sequencer steps. Here only every other step is active, this gives the desired 96 steps bass sequence from the video.
- if you hit play, you will notice that the trig on the first step will restart the arp every 16 steps, this is not what you want.
- put a trig mute on that step.
cool eh?
With this technique, you effectively can expand the length of a track to 16 bars, or 256 steps (provided that you don’t need notes faster than 16 steps… but it can be helped by using rhythmic sounds using stepping LFOs or something)
Now, the really cool thing about this is:
The arp pattern keeps playing infinitely, because the note that triggered it is of infinite length. Well, it keeps playing infinitely unless you mute the track, hit stop, or it is stopped by a sequencer step.
So what you can do with this is the following:
THE ARP TRANSITION TRICK
If you apply the technique to several patterns, let’s say always on track one, and on every pattern you keep the one trig that’s starting the arp muted, only unmuting it temporarily for starting the arp, and you switch from one pattern (with the arp arping) into another pattern, the sequence from the previous pattern keeps playing, until you unmute the new pattern’s arp trig.
So this allows for DJ-style mixing of patterns, including mixing of kits.
