Many people feel stuck in the rut of only making short loops 1-4 bars long with their hardware. It’s fun, but also tricky to get out of: endlessly noodling interactively around variations on that 1-4 bar loop, but never arranging a song, with a beginning, a middle, an end, and different sections with light and shade along the way.
I think this is down to groovebox design and I’d be interested to hear views on which do it well, but also why so few grooveboxes have thoughtful workflows around laying out a whole song.
The best that most get is the ability to chain single patterns one after another (“play 1, 2, 5, 5, 5, 5, 9, 9, 9, 9, 5, 5, 5, 5, 9, 9, 9, 9, 11”). This is the case on eg DT, OPZ, PO’s, etc.
But laying out a piece on a timeline is usually more about overlapping puzzle pieces, often with different lengths. Hats1 and Hats2 might be 2 bars. Chords1 and Chords2 might be 32 bars each. Riff1 might be 4 bars. And you want to mix and match those, experimenting. Doing this in Ableton is one of the great joys of Session View, and then printing it to the timeline view. Fewer devices are capable of that, and capable of it in a way that feels intuitive (to me, we’re all different!). So, OP1 in its weird tape workflow lends itself well to this arrangement and consolidation. M8 does it brilliantly, if you like the tracker mindset (and lots of users rave about how it helps them make actual finished songs because of that). Deluge does it too (I’ve never personally liked the arrangement mode, but we’re all different!).
If you want to achieve the same thing on a groovebox like DT, OPZ, etc with the paradigm of “single patterns that can be placed a chain” then you have to make all your patterns as long as the longest sub-pattern, copy things around, etc, which is such a hassle that… I think we often give up.
That feels like a weird failure on ethos and user-experience for grooveboxes, because as a genre, they’re often brilliantly well thought through for productive creative interaction. And each groovebox (or family, like Elektron) has its own fascinating opinionated workflows that make each one differently fertile for creating music.
The problem is, these seem to have been focused excessively on short loops. I think that collective and largely unspoken focus, has driven a whole community into a bit of creative difficulty around finishing things. This is often attributed to procrastination, of course, or perfectionism. But I think the absence of good facilitative tools is a part of it.
So, interested if others agree/disagree, or any brilliant song arrangement workflows I’ve missed!
