While recording in Song Mode, continuous sounds (for example sustained notes or effect tails) get cut when the next pattern starts. This may be expected behavior, but from a musical workflow perspective it feels a bit limiting.
Since seamless continuation is already possible when triggered manually, it seems the engine can handle this case. An optional way to preserve continuous sounds between patterns in Song Mode would be a very welcome quality-of-life improvement.
Hmm… I don’t use song mode very much, so this wasn’t something that I’d considered before now but it’s probably the expected behavior. I agree that if there’s no workaround it’s pretty limiting, musically.
Submit a feature request is the best suggestion that I have right now, maybe someone else has a proper workaround though.
I’m assuming that it doesn’t matter what length of trig you’ve set or if there’s nothing else on the track?
this is typical with all MIDI sequencers i’ve encountered so far. unless you set a sound to be triggered as a one-shot that can decay over the end of a given pattern cycle, the sequencer is always going to reset to beat one when the next pattern starts. playing with the sustain/release of a patch is a way to cheat, if it’s a more padd-y kind of sound
Song Mode on the Digitone can be a bit misleading at first. I ran into the same cut notes issue and realized each pattern change retriggers voices instead of carrying them over. Long pads or drones get chopped unless they’re reprogrammed across patterns. Using longer patterns or resampling helped me work around it without breaking the flow of the track.
Shouldn’t it be easy for electron to implement an option to let it carrying on instead of retriggering the voices?
It drives me totally mad, I can not produce my Dub Techno just on the DT2, song mode is totally useless for me!
Possibly dumb question, but would turning on Perform mode remedy this issue?
Is the problem just in the recording?
I’m a software guy so I can think of several reasons why that’s impossible to do.
Basically: You need to modify a note length in a previous pattern after you’ve switched to a new one, but … the previous pattern might have repeats, there might be repeated patterns in between the place where the note started and where you are now, every pattern can have different lengths or different tempos…
A pattern can also be re-used later in the song so should it modify the “future” copy of the pattern, too?
In short, this can only work in systems where the song mode has multiple patterns running side by side so you can have your long-note patterns in one column and everything else in another column. Elektron doesn’t do that.
TLDR; You can probably do this manually by editing trigs but live recording is much harder than you think.
I am also a software guy, I mean if the thing can play it live and has enough voices.
It should be also capable to do it programmed.
I mean we shoot people to the moon, cars drive alone, you can harvest your own organs with blood samples, orgonoids play doom, soon we have fusion reactor.
I think we have the technology needed?
Me? I’m surprised they even let you live record in song mode.
It literally cannot work in many circumstances (the majority?) and the ones where it does create more work in literally every other part of the composition. Electron song mode just isn’t the right tool for this job.
But do we have the motivation and the development budget?
There needs just to be an option to turn off, resetting between patterns?