Thanks for the help. I did experiment with the Advanced mode to CHNG the pattern after reading your post. Two issues: (this are probably going to come off like I’m arguing with you. I’m not trying to; I do appreciate your help).
- The first issue is that you can see a clear history of users expecting the Sequencer to honor Program Changes in Direct Jump mode.
My original post title was “Program Change MUST honor Direct Jump Mode”. This is the expectation people have had for at least 5 years and they come here confused like me why it’s not working. I think this is the common expectations on receiving Program Changes - the machine should respond to receiving a Program Change EXACTLY the way it responds to the user manually trigger a pattern change via the buttons. The MIDI spec doesn’t have a definition for “Direct Jump”, so Elektron should make it work the way it works in manual mode.
So in that regard, going into an Advanced mode to try to get the same behavior, while it may work, isn’t what people are expecting. Hence the posts for years on this topic.
- Setting the CHNG parameter (as a means of almost getting a Direct Jump response), comes quite close. However, I’m getting a bug that renders is unusable.
For some reason, of which I cannot explain, I have one Pattern that switches in and ADDS a beat. It misses the downbeat, and then goes back to 1 to add the down beat. It’s almost as if it’s emulating Direct Start mode… waiting a bit to process the program change (on beat 2), and the starting on beat 1.
For a rhythm machine, this is a cardinal sin. Drummer would get kicked out of bands for this behavior. It must keep the beat. I’ve fidgeted with my MPC for an hour trying to figure out why this one beat sometimes will switch properly, but almost always adds an additional beat when switching.
Sadly, my expensive, and in almost all other cases - totally awesome - analog drum machine will have to be sampled into my MPC for live use. Sadly, the entire expressive engine for Performance modes will be lost because the Drum Machine can’t respond to Program Changes in a non-buggy, dependable, as any user would expect, manner.
How hard is it to act upon a received Program Change and Directly Jump to another Sequence? We already know it’s possible because we can do it manually.
- The other issue I would say with trying to use the CHNG parameter method is that one is basically trying to trick the machine into responding programmatically the way it responds manually. So when I change the CHNG parameter, I have to sacrifice the acceptable Sequential Pattern Change behavior that as I user I expect when changing Patterns manually. (i.e. I’m having to alter the pattern to approximate setting it to Direct Jump, but in doing that I have to set Sequential to something I don’t really want)
I want the machine to respond programmatically the same way it responds manually. After all, internally there is a message being responded to.
Having to alter the manual response in a way to emulate - to trick the machine - into responding the expected way programmatically is a hack. Furthermore, the bug I’m experiencing makes it even worse of a hack because it’s behavior is not rhythmically dependable.
I guess I still hope I’m doing it wrong. Because after the years of posts, it seems Elektron won’t budge on fixing this the way their users keep telling them to fix it.
