Saving projects confusion

Elektron Gear Analog Keys/Four
#21

Good evening elektronauts and thanks a lot for all your discussions. very interesting and often funny.

Oh this topic with kit save drives me literally crazy. and it somehow limits my lust to just screw around a bit for fun on my a4.

With projects i don’t care, although it would be nice if saving and switching projects would be a bit easier.

but as i asked some months ago, I still don’t know how it is best to change patterns live. i mess around with a pattern and kit i like and want to go to another pattern, then i have to push pattern reload, because there is a nice kit auto reload when change function BUT not a pattern auto reload.

or simpler a let myself or friends mess around with every knob, turn off and its like before mode.

I still don’t know how you guys do live, with a lot of copies, and some of them you don’t touch or you save a project on computer?

Its a bit too much thinking and preparing for me, sadly because i really love the a bit soft sound for robert hoodesque stuff and the sequencer, more than for example my dominion 1 sound, this and the buggy sequencer etc drives me crazy and makes me want to sell the dom1, but at least i can mess around without worries.

thanks for the forum and sound enthusiasts. Good night

#22

Read the manual and learn, and that’s no allways fun. It’s a very simple system ones u get it - but not without effort. If you still don’t know how to change patters live - than what do you know about this machine?
I too have a Dom 1 and ofcoarse you can just twist knobs and save - nothing hard about that - enjoy :joy: another thing is to master it so you know how to get where - and surprize , that to will ask study and effort for the DOM 1 As with all things in life - you want to be good at it - prepare yousrselve to work hard.
To automate stuff is fun for those who don’t want to go deep or work hard , but when you go deep and start to grasp the system it’s pretty genious - I know some won’t agree with me .
I have no computer and manage easely, but instead of making songs right away I first learned the machine and stopped myself from going to fast…and lost alot of work… that’s sometimes painfull or boring but pays off at the end. And I’ve read and still do, every post up here.
I repeat - it’s a simple system that asks for some discipline - it’s been explained a thousend times on this forum, the work you have to do yourselves - understanding it dousn’t come by some kind of magic.
I don’t mean to offend you or anyone else , but I’m tired of explaining things over and over again while they are explained so many times allready - here - and in the manual. One thing is to really don’t understand something , another thing is to be lazy and expecting no suffering or loss
while
learning - only fun… maybe sometimes the greatest joy comes after effort that’ isn’t so funny :wink:
but to answer your qeastion partly > Whatever you tweek > SAVE IT AND MAKE A COPY AND WORK ON THE COPY - YOU LIKE IT - SAVE AGAIN and go on like that >>> only patterns are auto-saved WHEN SWITCHING PATTERNS !!!
So you have to save the kits and the song and sometimes the patterns - that’s 3 things to remember

  • that dousn’t seem hard do in my opinion :wink:
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#23

thanks a lot vos for this and all your other posts here.

but to answer your qeastion partly > Whatever you tweek > SAVE IT AND MAKE A COPY AND WORK ON THE COPY - YOU LIKE IT - SAVE AGAIN and go on like that >>> only patterns are auto-saved WHEN SWITCHING PATTERNS !!!

reading this forum and learning is fun.
Just thats exactly what i mean, if i didn’t do copy of something i liked or while live it gets super complicated with copy reload save.
If i did a copy (of pattern/kit or maybe better but more confusing project) and not live its nice n easy with a paper sheet.

And its not possible to let others mess around or myself put or remove trigs
AND turn knobs AND switch patterns without worries if or where i made copies.

If i wouldn’t like a4s sound , sequencer and this forum so much i would care less.
thanks good night

#24

Well, I asked support for the saving of kits within projects… This was the response:

Elektron Support | March 21, 2016 11:59:08 AM
Hi, Well, it’s true - but the issue is not so much with how Projects are saved. I think the issue here is the fact that Kits are kept in the volatile memory - but limited to one unsaved and one active Kit. It’s not so clear to the user that they should always save their Kits. You always need to save your Kits, and this is not an issue if you keep that practice. The Patterns however will save automatically as soon as any data in them is altered. Regards, Simon

2 Likes
#25

One thing on my mind, as a relative newcomer to the AK: I’ve saved and loaded several projects, and have not always remembered to save kits! But as far as I’m aware, I have not seen any changes to the sounds and state of the projects whilst doing so. Time to dig the manual out again! :sob:

#26

The plot thickens: only one active and one inactive kit are stored in volatile memory…

So if you edit 3 kits and save none of them, changes to the first kit will be lost, even before powering off.

That was the last push I needed to etch it in my brain: save the damn kits.

3 Likes
#27

I don’t really get all the trials and tribulations here, I think it’s fairly obvious to save your work as you go along.

If you want to tinker with a kit, or a sound in a kit then do a ‘save as’ and make a secondary copy of that kit.

Patterns seem to make it more confusing as they do save automatically, but NEVER TRUST THE MACHINES, they’re taking over the world and only one man can save… sorry, that’s a different conversation.

#28

You like a Kit : YES+KIT !
You’ve messed enough with your Kit and want to come back to the ace one : NO+KIT

With enough practice these 2 shortcut feel as natural as tweaking a filter.

2 Likes
#29

Sorry but this thread is exactly reflecting why so many people have problems with elektron machines. The machines are complicated because the have so many possibilities. In my eyes it is really making things worse if you get replies for a certain topic which are giving only 50% of facts (even from elektrons side, see Simons quote couple of posts before).
Yes: Patterns are automatically saved.
But you can also save Patterns. Why is that ?
It is important to think about that, because Pattern saving is a good example how elektron “thinks”.
You can save pattern to have the possibility to come back to a certain sate of the pattern if you tweaked it later on. Maybe you don’t like the changes or, what happened to me lot, if pulled again a cool p-locked trig. This p-locked trig is gone forever with autosave, but i could reload it in casei saved the pattern before.
It is like that in a way with kits and sounds. You have to think about what you want to keep. You have to save patterns to have aback up. You have to save kits to come back to it if you need. You have to save sounds on the +Drive to have them avalaible in other projects. Create a habit when to save something, then you can work on different projects, kits, pattern, sounds at the same time…because all will be there as you left it…simple as that.

2 Likes
#30

Apologies for reviving an old thread here, but I just set my gear back up after a gig in order to record it, and I have to say how thankful I am that one is compelled to save kits constantly. I was very purposeful and diligent in setting up for the gig, which used 41 patterns and 41 kits on both the AR and AK, and when I set everything back up and the last pattern was pulled up with all the sounds tweaked to hell, I panicked for a second that all of the changes I made throughout the set were saved. Thanks to Elektron’s brilliant, if initially unintuitive, file structure design, all I had to do was reload the last kit and unmute all the tracks I had muted.

So, if you are new to these machines, the saving and loading structure will be very confusing for a bit, but let yourself be humbled, and accept that you have a lot to learn, and you will be rewarded.

For about half of the patterns, I did not use any sounds on the AK, but I still saved new kits with each new pattern, and made sure the kit numbers were the same on both machines, just so I wouldn’t be confused when I looked from one machine to another, or if I wanted to add AK to a pattern later. It does take some housekeeping, but compared to the disasters I found myself in over and over with 10 years on the MPC1000 (where nothing is autosaved, playback and recording have to be stopped in order to load or save, and “delete” and “save” are one button push away), the Elektron is a dream.

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#31

Hello
Do I need to save my Projects sometimes or not? If yes, why? (I mean not initial save, when I want to give name to the project)
Many thanks

#32

If you leave the project and switch back to it it reloads from the saved state… If you don’t save before you switch you will lose all changes since the last save…

For me I use pretty much all saves as restore points, save when I like them, destroy them with tweaking, and then reload to get back…

1 Like
#33

I think you are talking about kit/pattern/sound saves, but not Project save.

It is interesting what exactly Save Project does :slight_smile:
Let’s say I have KIT 2 saved, and then I do some changes there and then will Save Project. Will it save current kit as KIT 2?

#34

Save project doesn’t save kits, they remain as how they were each individually saved last… The patterns and other global settings are saved as they are… So kit2 in you example wouldn’t have the changes…
Also If you save a kit(state1), save the project, save that same kit again(state2), and reload the project, the kit will be in state1 not state2 because that’s how it was when the project was saved…

So yeah, I do use kit save as restore point, but also project save to be able to then mess all my patterns up and reload to how I saved them…

2 Likes
#35

I have read the whole manual as well as read and searched the forums on the topic of saving projects…

But I am still confused.

What does SAVE PROJECT actually save?

Within a project we have PATTERNS and KITS, but both of these need to be saved independently with SAVE KIT and SAVE PATTERN. Saving the project doesn’t save your kits or patterns.

The global slot is auto saved I thought, so does SAVE PROJECT actually affect the global slot?

The 16 SONG’s that are part of a project need to also be saved independently with SAVE SONG.

So what does SAVE PROJECT actually do?

Does it just save the new sound pool?

Confused.

Thanks for the clarifications.

Spinposium

1 Like
#36

Same here.

i always just use ‘save project’ once I’m planning to make a new project, and ‘save kit’ before i want to start altering something i want to keep.

But i never use ‘save pattern’.
Why would i need to? (really dont know why).

#37

So you never save your project later after working on it? You only save it once initially? If that is the case, then again what is the point of SAVE PROJECT?

SAVE PATTERN is super useful for working on a new set of trigs and then reloading back to the saved state.

My workflow right now after I finish working on a new pattern is:

  1. SAVE SOUND
  2. SAVE KIT
  3. SAVE PATTERN
  4. SAVE PROJECT

It gets tedious to do that continuously, so I am trying to understand why the last SAVE PROJECT is necessary… what changes does it actually write out to disk when you save the project?

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#38

“SAVE PATTERN is super useful for working on a new set of trigs and then reloading back to the saved state.”

  • thanks, thats indeed a good reason.
#39

Yea if you do all those steps, there’s no point to save project, until you want to switch to another project, i guess

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#40

That still doesn’t make sense, because SAVE PROJECT does NOT save your KITS, SOUNDS, or PATTERNS… you can not just skip step 1-3 and then do step 4 and expect everything to save. It doesn’t work that way.

That is why I still do not understand what step #4 above SAVE PROJECT actually does… since steps 1-3 are required regardless of if you do step #4.

1 Like