I’m curious how everyone goes about organizing their patterns—not in terms of musical arrangement, but how you lay them out in the Bank/Pattern grid.
Do you go just straight from 1 to 16? Do you group your songs together in clusters? Or do you have some other way to organize them for when you perform or track?
For instance, I often use the top and bottom rows (1-8 and 9-16), to group different keys/progressions. Here, the song on the left (“Evenin’, Richard”) uses patterns 1, 2, 3, 9, 10, and 11, with the top three in Em and the bottom three in Gmaj:
The middle song in that bank, “Bona,” has three sections, A, B and C—I put A and B on top of each other because the bulk of the composition alternates between them, and put C in its own column because it’s the coda.
My hope is that this way I can load up this project months from now and still have some idea of how the song is structured without having to dig out that notebook. We’ll see.
I often start a new song from each edge (1 & 9 and 8 & 16) and work inward, using the blank patterns in the middle to make sure I don’t mix up songs. Below, the songs on the sides (“Buzz” and “Jumprope”) both have verses on the top row and the chorus on the bottom row. The two patterns in the middle are sketches that I’ll eventually move or delete:
The weirdest thing is, it seems like the way I lay out a composition in a bank can actually affect the way I perform. Like, whether I decide to repeat a refrain or transition to a new movement, etc., can feel right or wrong depending on how the patterns are laid out visually.
So, how do y’all organize yours?
