How do you get around the lack of per pattern mutes on the An4 when performing live?
I am aware that you can mute tracks in song mode, however I didn’t feel like song mode was great for performance - I would much rather decide on the fly when it was the right time to change patterns instead of programming that in advance.
I am coming at the A4 from the Digitakt, where I heavily use per pattern mutes when arranging the song and think it’s a great feature. Do any of you trigger pattern mutes and un-mutes from the over midi DT?
Yes I suppose that could work - insert a pattern that has no trigs for a given track, say the kick, then transition onto that.
On a side note, I have found the song mode useful for designing the arrangement of a track - you could quite quickly go through the pattern and mute structure and get a feel for the overall track dynamics.
Personally, a “next line” button would be ideal - a way of setting up the song mode structure in advance, but only progressing through it live on command.
Besides trig mutes and empty patterns/empty tracks you can achieve that also with kits. A kit that has track level(s) set to zero.
You could include track level in your performance macros, although the second macro page has an overview of all track levels.
You could even quick save your kit with track level up if you wanted to get rid of the pattern mute and ofc pattern mute again by quick saving with track level set to zero.
Depending on your kit structure, you could have two kits, one with mutes and one without - or several kits which have different tracks muted and one without mutes which would make organization and exchange/recalling kits easier.
Rename kits appropriately e.g. T1MUTE, PTNMUTE or smt like that.
I experimented with sending mute commands over midi from the Digitakt to the A4 yesterday and it isn’t satisfactory - the mute command arrives after the first trig has played, so you end up with messy transitions. This is also the case regardless of micro timing settings.
It also revealed a degree of flakiness with the midi interface - send a mute and unmute command in quick succession and the A4 won’t keep up.
The way to make midi controlled muting work cleanly is to send the mute command from the DT as well as having a “not 1st” conditional trig on the first note of the A4 target track’s pattern. But then you’ve end up with a slightly messy muting structure which is awkward if you want to make changes to the arrangement on the fly.
I’ve sort of settled on manually muting the tracks on the A4 during a performance for the cleanest transitions, but also having the mutes sent from the DT over midi as an (albeit slightly messier) back up in case I accidentally miss a mute.