Well why not just use deluge then as a midi sequencer and then record from each synth / gear multitrack ? Should not be too hard. And allows for a lot of performance fun!
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tbf Ableton Live Session view is the same thing and people still make full songs with it
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I’d say that’s because of the price. First, designing a simple sequence is cheaper than designing a capable sequencer. And if you want to cram controls for controlling sounds and controls for controlling a sequencer into a single device, you need to cut features, or you need to create a bigger box with more controls, which is more expensive.
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Probably down to the amount of dismissive grooveboxes out there.
Listen, a lot of this comes down to talent. Look at Ed Sheeran or K T Tunstall can do with talent and the simplest of simple loop pedals.
At our relevance - we’re constantly on the search for neatness. That box which can replace a whole studio of what Boards of Canada used. Aint happening.
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Roland Verselab has a nice song arranger mode built in. heck its designed for making a whole song instead of being a performance box.
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It’s a fair question and I think it comes down to:
- The complexity of the task on the one hand (making a beat with limited physical controls is challenging enough as it is, without considering a full song arrangement)
- The nature of grooveboxes: they are meant to get you into the groove, so to speak, and be used as a springboard to go from zero to a very promising 80% of a finished song, so the emphasis is placed on the parts that will help you get going, rather than emphasizing on getting you through to the finish line.
That said, I strongly believe that it in large part comes down to discipline: if you think about it, a timeline in a DAW consists of a series of “bars”. The same can be said about a groovebox, which consists of a number of “patterns” (or “sequences”, or whatever they call it in each groovebox). Fundamentally it’s the very same concept: it’s a chunk of music that you can puzzle together into something cohesive.
Nothing stops you from making a copy of a pattern 3 times and modifying them to become a part of a larger buildup using automation on the Syntakt/Digitakt/Digitone or similar grooveboxes. The MPC even makes this easy with its Sequence paradigm that lets you call each section “Intro”, “Verse 1”, “Chorus” etc. It’s a bit of copy/paste work involved, but isn’t that true in the DAW too?
So really, it has more to do with your discipline to make those copies of a pattern, explore a differing bassline, try a new melody, remove the drums to discover how a breakdown might work, and then program those things in sequentially.
In my experience, the machines that make this the easiest are the modern MPCs. They’re really meant to make full songs on. Second place in my opinion is the Push 3, where you can record the full arrangement from a live jam. Third place is the Elektron Overbridge workflow, which lets you use its Song Mode to play back a sequence of patterns while you jam freely with the knobs across all tracks. A far distant fourth in my opinion is the MC-101, but that’s mostly due to how fiddly the workflow is there. In the end, they share similar paradigms: blocks of music that you need to stitch together into a song. Just like in a DAW. 
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Just want to second this. Absolutely love the way this works on the M8. The entire workflow is built on arranging from the ground up and it’s so intuitive and flexible.
I use the song modes on the Elektrons a lot and I’m really glad Elektron added them to the Digis but it definitely requires a bit more forethought and patience to get the most out of them.
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Yeah, the song mode is nice, but it doesn’t give you the freedom to go in and edit one pattern while a different one is playing. Which basically means that if I want to edit the patterns I leave song mode. So it’s not as seamless as would be ideal.
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Well, the one thing that might stop you is that if you change your mind about the sounds in that copied pattern you then have to replicate the change twice more. (From the M:S/M:C perspective that is, I suspect the song mode digi boxes may make this less of a problem).
This must be a good part of what makes the scene/clip paradigm (e.g. MC-101, or deluge now, I think) or the M8 paradigm (which I know is not common to all trackers) attractive to the OP.
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it sucks! but luckily there‘s song mode in elektrons, especially the digis allow for working fast and lay down and tweak a form.
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I made the Squarp Pyramid the brain of my setup years ago because of these concerns. It is nice to have a convenient and pointed sequencer that isn’t bound by most of the limitations mentioned.
I can only speculate that to make a deep, versatile sequencer is no small task - and grooveboxes are already deep, feature packed devices. To have all of this in a dedicated unit would look alot like a DAW in a box - which may not make alot of sense for hardware companies to take on. From a product perspective. 
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IMO it’s about us how we are using a tool.
If a groove box would support to store only 1-4 bars, it would be very limiting for song writing and okay for live performance and tweeking. But which of the recent groove boxes is limited like this?
If a groove box provides many more patterns to prepare and to recall for later use, than it’s on us whether we write short pattern grooves or work on song structures.
The structure of a song could be like this:
- 8 bars intro
- 8 bars outro
- verse and maybe two variations of 8 bars (24 bars)
- chorus with two variations of 8 bars (24 bars)
This would be 16 pattern, each 4 bars long, some pattern-chaining and a very basic song 
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However, if you have better tools, and the same amount of “discipline”, you can create more complex stuff in the same time, or simply get more stuff out.
I think that is what @Flymo meant when they said:
IMHO the difference between a good hardware sequencer and a groovebox sequencer is night and day. I’d put Cirklon/Pyramid/Deluge/M8 in the former category, and OT/ST/DT and “old” MPCs in the latter category. I have no clue about current MPCs, they might also be good.
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A few thoughts, as someone who prefers writing and arranging to performing live:
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Hardware manufacturers have to reckon with the existence of DAWs. DAWs are the default for how a lot of electronic musicians expect to arrange their music. Making sure your groovebox can make good, importable loops is maybe more useful to DAW users than being able to build the whole song on hardware and hit record
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Live hardware performance culture has an emphasis on improv. So many jokes about performers “just pressing play.” This means changing things at the pattern level quickly becomes a higher priority than changing broad structure
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Most grooveboxes are geared toward loop-heavy genres like techno, house, etc.
Tl;dr: it’s not a priority for a good chunk of potential users
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Digitakt (and I imagine quite a few other sampling grooveboxes) allow you work around that to an extent by use of resampling, which combined with conditional trigs etc can offset that problem enough for most users.
As others mentioned, it’s really a matter of intended use. Grooveboxes are designed for making dance music, and simple pattern chaining will do the job for a lot of users. The hardware DAW approach offers more comprehensive and detailed control, but at the cost of immediacy. Maybe a combination of both might work better for OP?
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I think this is a much bigger driver of music hardware than people realize. Trying to match DAW functionality is a losing battle. So hardware manufacturers have to compete in other ways. It’s why no one is making a rompler with 128 note polyphony or any of the other things that were purportedly “solved” (with an awful user interface) by hardware in the late 90s and early 2000’s.
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My brain goes to the origins of the groove box, or rather the folks who designed them. I wonder if maybe they weren’t “song writers” so they didn’t think to implement this. I’m not throwing shade at them. I think about how many OG amp and pedal builders were engineers before they were musicians, or even composers, so they didn’t think like a song writer.
Then there’s also the fact that once the groove box hit the market and it’s popularity rose, the " if it ain’t broke don’t fix it" mentality might’ve been in play.
I also think about how home recording wasn’t as common as it is now. Folks took their instruments in to a studio to track their songs, or just played them live, so the groove box could’ve been seen as another instrument like a guitar, piano, drum set, etc.
These are just pre coffee ideas. Not saying any of this is fact.
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For sure, clips are probably more useful in that sense of reducing the redundancy and need for copy/pasting. That said, there are benefits with the pattern paradigm on the Elektron boxes too: you can really change things up in a pattern and stumble over completely new ideas that take your songs into new territory. And if that isn’t a core part of the purpose of a groovebox, I don’t know what is. 
I find that the copy/paste jobs on an Elektron is faster than on any other groovebox anyway so it’s a small price to pay for that added level of flexibility in the discovery phase of song writing.
No doubt, each groovebox has its own set of design philosophies and limitations, but fundamentally it’s the same principles.
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I don’t understand this argument. The first product calling itself a groovebox was the MC303 from Roland and it had a song mode. Roland invented the word. It’s literally written on the MC303 panel, top right corner.
It also had 2 nice stuff, the RPS system (basically playing tracks from other patterns on top of the currently running pattern, though only the MC505 could have custom ones), and pattern sets where the keyboard could be used to switch patterns easily.
Imagine if you could trigger tracks from other patterns on a Digitakt while a specific pattern is running., without switching patterns. Isn’t it the very definition of a “performance function”?
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Arrangement is really like the most important part of making a song. With hardware I just track everything into a daw as soon as possible and cut it up and arrange in there. I don’t think a hardware box could ever come close to the arranging power a daw has. Just jam on the box and finish in the daw has been what I have learned works best for me.
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