Hey, I’m probably doing something wrong but I can’t figure it out.
I have some patterns that I want to put in a song but it won’t advance through the song rows. Stays stuck on whichever row I start it at.
The patterns use advanced scale mode for polyrhythms. LEN = INF, CHNG = 16. This works for manually changing patterns in Sequential mode (CHNG 16 is necessary to not have it loop endlessly without ever changing to the new pattern). However it does not seem to work in song mode.
Any ideas? I didn t find an answer in the manual or forum search.
Chng Length doesn’t work in song mode, chain mode and neither when triggered by pc when chaining Elektron gear together… only works when pressing the buttons yourself…
I found that out a while ago, it seems to always have been like that unfortunately from what could find
@quentinhyt, @dtr it definitely looks like a bug based on how the manual says that it should work. I just filed a ticket with Elektron. By the way, one work around I am using for now is to explicitly set the LEN parameter for patterns I want to use in a chain. This way they advance to the next pattern in the chain just fine
I am trying to understand why the workaround doesn’t work. I understand that setting LEN to INF allows for polyrhythms to be created in a pattern since different tracks might different have repeat cycles that contribute to the polyrhythms. However in the case of chains and songs, you only want the pattern to play for a specified number of steps. Therefore you have to indicate how long to play the pattern before moving on. Based on the manual this should be possible through by setting CHNG parameter. However, in the workaround I do this by setting the Master LEN parameter.
If individual tracks are set to a number of steps less than Master LEN, then they repeat as they should once they get to the end of their cycle. For individual tracks whose number of steps are set to a value greater than Master LEN, their pattern is not restarted because once the pattern advances to the Master LEN, the next pattern in the chain is played. I don’t see how this break polyrhythms. Am I missing something?
The manual is, unfortunately, a bit misleading about this (I will let our technical writer know). The song/chain will not advance to the next pattern automatically if a pattern has INF length. This is by design. If you manually go to the next pattern in the chain and select it (chain button, arrow keys, yes) it takes the CHNG parameter into account. The pattern will, in other words, play indefinitely unless there is some user action. When manually cueing a pattern, there is always user action so that’s why the pattern then advances according to the set CHNG parameter.
This behavior has been debated over the years. A simple workaround would be to make a copy of the pattern and set the master length to what you would have set as the change length when using it in a chain, but I understand that this is a bit of a detour. What I can do is to forward arguments as to why it should work differently to our developers.
I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want it to work?
Chng is when it should change to the next pattern regardless of which method eg chains/manually/PC…
Why does it still listen to Chng settings but then change late?
The thing is, the Octatrack can be set to inf and you can set a change length
and it works brilliantly. It can be slaved to another machine and have any settings you want and will change at the correct time
I am fully with you. I want the CHNG parameter to work like it says it should work in the manual. You were quoting the reply from Elektron on when I reported the issue of the chng parameter not working. I don’t own an octatrack but it is good to know that it chng works in this way on the octatrack. From a product design perspective, it would make sense for their devices to work in consistent ways.
