Ah, OK. Sorry still away from my SP, but I think there may still be an advantage for some people to do it the way I described above.
Someone had complained earlier about it being difficult to grab your instrument when using resample as you have to hit the pattern button to start recording.
If you use the skipback mode, you have the advantage of being able to watch the pattern bar counter.
For instance, I had an 8-bar drum pattern and wanted to record an 8-bar guitar part. With the method above you can wait for the drums to loop around (8-1, 8-2, 8-3,8-4), and then start right on the first beat, and also keep track of where you are in the 8 bars as you play. Then you just have to trim off the extra bit at the beginning when you are done, but as long as you started on the first beat and ended on the last bar, it’s easy to grab your guitar part from the Skip Back mode, and know the length matches the 8-bars (ie, not having to trim the end).
With the resample method, it not only starts recording right away since there is no count in, if I’m remembering correctly, it also doesn’t show you the pattern counter (and just shows record, as you said), so you have to keep track of the pattern length by ear, and if you don’t get it right, the sample you have recorded won’t match the length of the pattern, which makes the recording and trimming process a bit more complicated.
Watching the bar count is also helpful for planning and recording overdubs to drop into certain parts of the pattern later.
Anyway, just another way to try.