I’m forcing myself to arrange songs in song/chain mode on my MD and RYTM because frankly, I want to know as much as possible about the hardware. I also feel like having a skeleton laid out where I can go into each pattern and make different fills, do different parameter tweaks and have all that happening before I print to audio could be a lot more advantageous than doing it all in the DAW later. I also would love to be able to play my tracks live because I think it will make writing faster if I do it enough. Plus I’m arranging with my ears and going by feel which I think is the ultimate way to make a dance tune (at least to me).
The key thing here is my master clock is ableton and I send clock out of that into an E-RM multiclock and into all my hardware. That is how I start my machines, so when it is time to record I just record enable in Ableton and I’m off.
So in this tune I have the RYTM carrying the main elements and the MD with the percussive sounds and ghost kick. Pretty basic stuff. What I did so far is make 8 copies of my main 64 bar pattern in the RYTM and 8 copies of my 32 bar pattern in the MD. From there I will edit the patterns down, get the basic arrangement and then start adding fills and such. I made tracks this way on a Cirklon before but now with more machines in the mix, things start to get a little more daunting.
One reason is the MD song mode is a bit different. I believe both machines don’t memorize mutes per pattern and you have to just delete the trigs. Thats fine because it lets me mute the clap or bass if I want and then track that in later on. It makes sense there, especially for live jamming, where I can mute/unmute whenever I want.
But what’s odd is in the Machine drum I made a basic 32 bar pattern, set the repeat for 8 and hit play. When I hit play on the MD itself, (not triggering with ableton) it plays 8 times and then stops. Perfect. But when I hit play in ableton and trigger it through the DAW/E-rm Multiclock, it plays only one time and then stops. This doesn’t make much sense to me. I can post this in the MD forum as well but I thought maybe some you vets here may know this. I could easily be missing something obvious here. I should mention I hit stop twice so it resets each time I try this.
The RYTM song mode seems to make a little more sense. I hit play in ableton and it plays the duration I tell it to and then stops. Cool.
I definitely need to RTFM a little more because the song edit mode button turns two shades of blue and the mute pads turn yellow, and I don’t know what that means. So I need to learn that.
But I thought I’d see if anyone of you have ideas for that MD issue and also if you have done this type of worklfow and can offer any advice. I can see this becoming really awesome for composing really nice beats that have more movement and complexity than a DAW can do without a lot of editing. Or maybe I am just crazy. Thoughts, advice welcome