How are you using banks and patterns?

so it seems like there are 6 banks and 96 patterns available for each project. Thats a lot !

Just wondering how people are using these ? For me it seems like i have so many patterns available but without being able to share a kit of sounds between patterns, its feeling a bit wasted or am i just not thinking about them in the right way?

Are people putting different songs on different patterns in the same project? I’m still very new to M:S so interested in how other people are approaching this.

Project / Banks / Patterns

I treat the banks as an organizational tool. Bank A is the performance bank, Banks B-E are for pattern and song creation, usually the stuff in each one is related, Bank F is for temporary stuff and sound creation.

And as for the kits vs patterns thing … here are the ways of dealing with it that I can think of:

  • Use trig conditions and different track lengths and speeds to make patterns more varied (that is squeeze as much “song” out of a single pattern as possible)
  • Copy and paste machines manually between patterns
  • Use the Kit Save/Load feature
  • Use an external sequencer such as Ableton or Pyramid to add variation across a song (whether by audio clips or additional MIDI-controlled sounds), or simply control the Cycles via MIDI. (the last one gives up P-locking, unfortunately CC control is not the same in every respect)

I’ve created entire backing tracks for songs using pattern chaining. It’s not that bad.

1 Like

Oh cool. Thats some good ideas. So you are using projects as songs mainly as opposed to a project containing lots of songs?

It depends on the kind of music. One project I have is a set of beats and loops for live performance, while the rest are pre-programmed progressions meant to record into a DAW.