This feature would probably have to be for a completely new version of the Octatrack.
I really wish you could create continually changing material in patterns. For example, let’s say you have the lyrics of a verse and they’re sliced up into many parts so you can arrange them however you want over the verse. The music is going to repeat, say, 8 times for the section, but you want the lyrics to be different for each repetition and you want all the lyrics on one track. To do this on the Octatrack you have to copy the pattern 8 times and arrange the lyrics on each pattern. Another example would be recording a guitar solo or something over the section (which I know is possible, but the support for it is weak… you have to have enough memory for available for one). Or maybe you want to overdub a bunch of one-shot samples over the section without having to program them with conditional trigs and all that (which has another problem of not being able to stack trigs on one step when you want different trigs on the same step of 1:2 and 2:2, for example).
I think a good solution would be to have tracks that were longer than the pattern (by a certain multiple), and have an indicator on the screen that would show and allow you to play and browse through the repetitions of the pattern so you could play/record/edit different parts of the longer tracks. The point is that each repetition of the longer track would have its own trigs.
And while I’m here, it would also be awesome to be able to put a “pick-up” trig towards the end of a pattern that would mark the start of pick-up notes on a track. How this would work is when you change patterns to the pattern with a pick-up trig, the pick-up notes would start playing before the pattern changed. So if you put a pick-up trig on a track on the last beat of the last bar of the pattern and switched to that pattern, the last beat of that track of the pattern would play over the last beat of the same track of the currently playing pattern before switching to the next pattern (the one with the pick-up trig). This might sound complicated, but isn’t anything crazy, it’s a standard musical technique. Right now I have to create a copy of a pattern to do pick-up notes. Using copied patterns for slight variations sucks because if you want to make a change to the pattern, you have to go through and make the change to every single copy.
I think these features would be really useful for making more naturally flowing music.
