So will Overbridge if it ever comes out for A4mk2 make it possible to export the patterns to midi? or to export them at all?
I’m quite sure that “pattern to midi” is NOT a feature of OB2 (for any of their devices).
MIDI is simply to restricted to hold all the possible data in a pattern and get the timing right. Think of all kind of locks you can set on a single trigger (on one track/channel) and how much of them can be there and needs to be triggered at the “same” time …
I wonder if exporting just pattern alone is even useful, because without the data from the kit and the project settings it wouldn’t sound the same when importing it into another project.
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I see your point but a bit more thought in the beginning on Elektrons part could’ve made this possible by using standard cc commands.
I mean even if they are using proprietary internal commands, anyone know what they actually use?
a simple conversion to Sysex and back would do the job no?
Would be worth so much for people wanting to export and remake in DAW like myself, even just the notes would be something.
I find the A4 AWESOME for sketching out song ideas but theres just not enough patterns for me to make whole songs, if it had 10 times the pattern memory it would be something but even then you want a DAW environment to properly flesh something out properly, otherwise you just have patterns just repeating over and over.
No
Well, they could export it as some kind of MIDI data, but it wouldn’t work out to stream this MIDI data back live to the device and get the same sound experience since MIDI is a serial protocol and can send only ONE message at any given time. Due to the somewhat slow maximum transfer speed you will hear some kind of latency effects (MIDI overload) quite soon.
Since exporting projects as Sysex is already possible it would be nice if Elektron would publish the format specification. This way it would become possible to extract all kind of data from the Sysex (like the note triggers).
About pattern memory:
I can see why the 64 steps of a pattern are quite restrictive. But you have 128 of them and with song mode you can join them in any order you want. Is that really not enough for a song?
For me it’s more the “just 4 voices” restriction which drives me to the DAW (mainly for layering multiple runs and mastering).
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What even too slow with MID over USB?
Pattern memory, yeah its just about ok for 1 or 2 songs if you want to do something different on each bar but would be nice to have a dozen songs for a set in memory without having to load a new song every time and say another dozen sketched songs in progress.
I hate this compositional low bar being set for hardware devices, where music is just a few bars looping over and over again, I like repetitive music but it’s only one type of music not THE only type of music, makes it too much like a toy and limits it the usage.
When sketching out ideas on the A4 it’s really nice to jump quickly between song ideas, sometimes mixing and matching, which is not good if you have to stop and load another song, doesn’t work then.
It really baffles me when memory is SO cheap that they didn’t have at least 10 times the pattern memory and a simple system to access the patterns, it’s totally doable, I find it every short sighted and makes the instrument dumbed down.