I’m new here but I’ve been reading the forums for a while now. I just wanted to raise an issue with the Song mode on the A4/Keys. Firstly let me explain my setup. I currently use my Octatrack and my A4 for live sets, I set up long arrangements in the OT so all the tracks are sequenced and played with the press of a button leaving me to tweak and change scenes without worrying about hitting the next pattern. I do it this way because my patterns are very long and if I missed the loop point it would take a long time for the next pattern to start. Anyway, I then slave the A4 to the OT and send the outputs of the A4 into the OT using it as a mixer. I also setup all my tracks in the song mode on the A4 so both machines are in sync and match up.
My issue is that the A4’s song mode seems extremely limited compared to the OT’s arranger. The OT’s arrangements can be seemingly endless but the A4’s have a hard limit and whats more frustrating is that if your arrangement is very long at some point in the arrangement all transport controls from the OT send the A4 right back to the start of the song, like its restarting because its reached its length limit, I’m not sure how many chains or patterns it takes before this happens but its the same every time. If I let the arrangement and the song play without stopping this isn’t an issue, it plays all the way through as if the two machines were playing independently, but as soon as you want to start the arrangement from a place after the song mode’s limit it just starts it at the beginning.
This is extremely irritating when I’m trying to edit the song or arrangement. I have got around it recently by using multiple arrangement files and manually chaining them together as the song/arr plays but this still means that when I want to edit or work on my set I have to make separate song files to go with my separate arrangement files, and then when I’m done editing I have to then copy each of the song file’s chains into a master live set song file that contains all chains. Suffice to say that this is tedious as hell.
What would be great is if I could either chain song files together like you can with arrangements on the OT, or alternatively just make song mode limitless in terms of how long you can make the songs.
I really hope that makes sense. Does anyone else run into this issue?
I don’t have a QT but a work-around fo the A4 - AK could be to make a chain at the end of the song and put it at 99X . probably not the solution you’re looking for. it would be fantastic if songs could be chained, but I don’t see this happening as it’s impossible to load more than one project A project can contain several songs ( wisharing patterns and KITS … ) but I never saw a function to chain them ( it’s possible to make a pattern loop infinitly in a song or chain - but than this pattern will keep on looping I think )
What you suggested wouldn’t solve anything I’m afraid, thanks for trying though
As for song chaining on the A4, I would have thought it would be a very simple thing to implement as you don’t need to change projects to change songs. I have multiple songs in the one project but can’t chain them together by any other means than making one extremely long sing file that contains all my tracks and thus causes the aforementioned issue of transport glitching between the OT and A4.
I’ve read that A4 Song Mode is perhaps quite limited, but still I am little confused here:
Is Song Mode actually just putting patterns one after another and then playing it from the top to bottom. I mean no looping or jumps to different positions? Song just plays from start to end and stops. If so it is VERY limited…?!
(Of course you can do those transposes and muting but now I am thinking about the structure)
You can see from screenshots in the Song Mode section of the AF/AK manuals that each song row can contain a chain of patterns, and each row can be looped to repeat a specific number of times, but there are no jumps to specific positions in a song.
Song mode on the mnm/md is a little better, you can enter offsets (shorten & legnthen patterns), individual pattern bpm, and mutes. You can also jump around patterns when actually performing using song mode.
Yeah, I had MnM years ago and remember it having all these seq features. I was hoping that it would be something similar with A4mkII but to my surprise it was a lot simpler. It’s a pity cause now song structure is predetermined. To me it reduces quite a lot of its live use…
…well after some testing:
fortunately I can do something what I want if I switch from Song Mode to Chain Mode and back in the middle of song. Maybe that was the original idea, who knows…? Anyway this makes it possible to loop some row (chain) and then go forward.
Another limitation: Saved Song does not save tempo, or does it? If so, you must always remember those tempos and adjust them by hand which is a limitation imo.
That’s also how I’ve also managed to handle issues similar to what you’re descricing. I toggle the “chain” button to use it as a basic “loop the current pattern within the song” function. Not the most straightforward thing but it became a second nature over time.
