Okay… having never used the MD’s actual song mode at all, when recording a track i just manually change patterns by hand.
But want to try the MD’s song mode to do it for me.
The chapter at the beginning of the song mode section in the manual does not make much sense “A song can be up to 256 steps long” did they not mean measures ?
My track roughly works out at 300 measures long. Which would put the track at roughly about 8 minutes.
Can the MD handle a song that long ?
They mean numbered rows on the song. Put a pattern with as many repeats as you like on a row in the song editor, and you can therefore have many more than 300 measures/bars/pages or whatever we choose to call them.
i think they meant “steps” as amount of chained patterns
Yea the 256 is ‘steps’…not measures.
One cool function about song mode is the repeats feature, so you could in theory build yer 300 measure song out of three 1-measure patterns, each repeating 100 times (if the MD allows that high a number for repeats…I can’t remember, but you get my point).
Also in song mode you can cut and paste patterns, ie play the first 8 steps of pattern A1 followed by the second 8 steps (or 7, or whatever) of pattern A2.
With all the looping, jumping, etc features of song mode, you could probably do a song that was hours long.
Really powerful mode once you get down with it.
love song mode!
wonderful ways of mixing up your patterns, so much more fluid than any other song mode ive encountered!
–being able to set start and end points is so liberating!–(i was waiting for years for a drum machine to be capable of doing that)
NOTE:this even allows you to play your pattern backwards! just assign every single step of your original pattern to an individual row, and then set the order to your liking , or just screw your patterns beyond recognition with this method-
Double the fun with slide tracks, which will also get changed completely!
AND!! the mute option adds beautiful insanity.
ive programmed beats where i had my base pattern trigger every machine at every step (with some slides tossed in),
and then i programmed the actual beats in song mode, muting tracks where i didnt want a machine to sound, and leaving the ones i wanted to sound open. in other words, a way of programming where you dont set what you want to hear at what step, but what you want to leave out…wonderfully weird stuff will happen!
hope this somehow is comprehensible…
the main idea behind all this was that rows of a song can be treated as steps of a pattern.
(now all i need is a song mode for the song mode…)
but even in more conservative ways, the song mode is a true gift, great dynamical tool.
Cheers everyone who replied.
Song mode is something i should have used a long time ago with the MD.
Oh well… better late than never!!
Hats off to Elektron though for something so ingenious, yet simple.