Project and song management

Elektron Gear Syntakt
#1

Probably a rehash, but I’m just looking for other perspectives on when people start a new project and organize songs.

I find I loose track of where songs are and I often will just fill up a project to as many patterns / songs and then I’ll start a new project.

A few times I’ve started a project based on a genre or some kind of gig.

I will often keep a song related to a certain bank but sometimes I’ll have patterns that are coming from other banks.

Would you keep a project a specific scale?

Is it just kinda whatever?

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#2

I’d say yeah, it’s kinda whatever.

But in all seriousness, how you organize your projects / songs is mostly just personal preference. Unfortunately the level of friction associated with copying songs / patterns from project to project on any of the Elektron machines besides the Digitakt is quite high. Digitakt has access to Elk Herd, which I feel like is a tool that Elektron should implement for all of its products. I ran into this same issue with the Digitone where I’d have patterns strewn across several different projects with no real way of organizing / finding them easily and it ultimately made that machine much less enjoyable to use.

YMMV but that’s my two cents.

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#3

Interesting topic. I used to try and create projects based on genres but I’ve realised this doesn’t work for me because…
1- I end up having tons of projects with not many patterns / songs.
2- Often I like to jam without thinking of a genre.

My current approach; which I find very liberating is to fill an entire project with whatever, then move the patterns to banks for a specified genre or bpm. For example, bank A house 117bpm, bank B electro 135 bpm, Bank E downbeat / experimental.

And yes, I do unwittingly keep all my projects to specific scale, C minor :smiley:

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#4

I tend to keep a bank in a specific scale.

If a pattern starts to feel like it has a different vibe I’ll move it to another bank.

I really wish one could consolidate a song into a bank or move the song over to a “genre” project

#5

On the M:C this is possible cross-project with pattern copy, though a bit tedious if your song is more than one pattern.

Is it the same on Syntakt ? Or harder for some reason ?

#6

I imagine it’s roughly the same. The dream is that you could select a song and copy it to a new pattern and it would load the patterns sequentially and it would maintain song structure and proper links to patterns.

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#7

elkherd, but it doesnt work on digitakt 1.5! not sure on the sytakt

#8

Yeah this, I’m not sure if you’re literally talking about song mode, but that is my dream… I often end up having to move songs between projects and I really wish you could copy the song as well, would make it from an extreme time sink pain in the ass to a happy dream :slight_smile: Love song mode as that’s how my brain works, but I hope they make some improvements to it, but at least it exists now!

#9

Understand. When I posted about M:C I was thinking of “song” as a collection of patterns (perhaps one) and forgetting the syntakt actually has a song mode.

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#10

I recently started this new thing where Projects are basically are just “[name] #”, aka JAMZ1 or JAMZ2 or so on, unless it’s for something super specific or jamming with a friend. Then it’s directly the project name or person I’m jamming with.