I know there are a few older topics on the general idea of using pattern banks as “songs”, but I want to know a bit more about everyone’s workflow when writing new songs and organizing for live sets.
I have been writing a number of songs with my Digitakt and Digitone, and just got an Analog Four and incorporating it is making me rethink song organization a bit.
It seems to work pretty well to build a song with matching banks/patterns between Elektron machines, mostly using one project, but I’m running into some hang ups when certain banks become much better songs than others, and some banks never really form into something worthwhile.
Do you typically go back and prune away the half-started ideas and try again, do you laboriously copy and paste patterns between banks/projects across each machine to keep it clean, or do you just accept the entropy and note that “my songs are A, B, D, and F for this show, ignore all others as they are probably incomplete, bad, or empty”?
Also, when do you use different projects? I know certain hardware like the Digitakt have sample pool limits Based on project, so I can see that limitation requiring a new project, but what other situations are different projects useful? How do you keep track of different tempos when sharing the same project?
Also, I’m new to the A4, so if there are any additional organizational tricks that it has that the Digi-boxes don’t, feel free to call them out!