Just got my AR the other day and although Im finding it quite a challenge to get to grips with it, when I do I am blown away by what it can do. Ive got a couple of things that I am unsure about and would appreciate some help. Ive had a scan of the topics but cant seem to find what I need.
Firstly Saving. Should you just periodically save what you are doing to a sound, track, pattern etc? Im assuming there is some sort of auto save as after being off, my patterns are still there when I get back. Although some sounds had changed / reset. Just wondering how it works?
I would save in this order of priority:
[ul]
[li]Project[/li]
[li]Kit[/li]
[li]Sound[/li]
[li]Pattern[/li]
[li]Song[/li]
[/ul]
There’s a nice diagram of the AR’s project structure. That should give you an idea of what you should be saving
If a kit hasn’t been saved and you load another kit (or another pattern that uses another kit) then your previous kit is reset. So it’s a good habit of saving a kit as soon as you start to like it.
Now sounds are a part of a kit and it makes sense to save them if you’d like to reuse them in another kit or as sound locks.
You want to save a pattern if you want to screw with it by adding/deleting trigs and then revert to your basic pattern in an instant.
Song is self explanatory I guess.
Project is a mind state of the machine which remembers all your kits, sounds, patterns and songs. Once you change the project you cannot access any of these (I think) except for samples which are stored on the +drive
This pretty much covers it. I will add that you will definitely want to make sure that you save on the project level. Make sure you do this before you switch to another project because if you haven’t ever saved it before, it won’t be there when you try to come back regardless of whether you saved any individual patterns, kits or songs within it. I found that out the hard way. Should have known better, and you do get served TWO prompts to save before another project is loaded…but I got confused once.
Thanks so much for the replies, they have really helped. Following on, do you save each and every pattern once you have done a bit more to each one? Or you know when you switch projects and it asks if you want to save the changes, is that what it saves? Do you know what else it saves when you switch?
So patterns are the one thing I don’t bother saving because of the auto saving behavior of the machine in general.* I guess the one exception would be the scenario 4.33 discussed above: You’ve got a pattern you like, but want to try altering with a bunch of trig additions/subtractions/whatever. So you save it and then can mess with it ad naseum, but know that you can always revert to the saved version (“no”+"pattern) if things don’t go the way you want.
So when you switch projects, yes, the patterns you worked on are saved, but so is everything else you’ve done: kits, sounds, songs…
So…Imagine you have a project you’ve worked on and like. You’ve saved it on the project level at this current state you like. You could go in and fuck with things in any manner - perhaps change kits asssociated with patterns, add trigs, p-locks, make new songs…whatever. If you then switch to another project but DON’T save prior to loading, when you come back, you’ll be at the previously saved state.
Does that make sense?
I’m actually thinking I may start saving patterns too. I’ve had a few scenarios where I’ve inadvertently altered a pattern to the point where it’d be a hassle to do the work to get it back. I’ve gotten back by exiting the project without saving - as described above - but that wouldn’t be a good option if there were something I had done in the project after the last save that I didn’t want to lose…
