A few things that I learned:
(1) Pattern chain mode is great! What was not obvious to me is that you can use the “repeat” function live to get one pattern to play repeatedly. So if you have a 4-bar pattern, but want that to be 8-bars, I first tried to just put the same pattern twice in the chain, but surprisingly that doesn’t seem to work. Then I went the long way around and resampled the pattern into 8-bars and made another pattern to replace the one in the pattern chain. It turns out you don’t need to do that you can just toggle on the repeat pattern function live as you resample.
(2) If you are going to layer stuff, there is a handy function where you can make the original sample not go through any effects (to avoid doubling up effects). Remain + Pad, until the pad turns white. I’ll definitely be using this a lot.
There is also a function called “grab effects” that looks handy, I’m going to try that next time as it can be tricky to duck effects in and out as you resample.
(3) When grabbing something from the autosampled thing (why can’t I remember what that’s called), don’t trim it exactly unless you are sure you know it’s exactly like you want it. Take a generous amount and set your start/stop points after it’s sampled on a pad or you risk losing this work if it doesn’t loop perfectly. For instance, I had things that either didn’t loop right that I had to redo or things that did loop, but didn’t loop on the downbeat, so they didn’t integrate well with my other patterns later (so I had to do some extra work to fix them or scrap them and start over).
(4) This one I need to double check, but it seems like if you make a pattern and later move the source sample to a different bank or pad to tidy things up, that sample becomes disconnected from the pattern. I was hoping the machine would be smart enough to follow pad exchanges, but it doesn’t. So basically I had a pattern that was a pain to make, later moved some samples around, and went back and the pattern was blank. I couldn’t remember where the samples were originally so I couldn’t move them back and the pattern itself doesn’t show any information about what’s in the pattern so you will have no info as to how to fix it.
Basically, it’s a good idea to come up with a good workflow for where you put your samples and be very careful once you are at the stage where you are making patterns.
In general, I use one bank as the bank I resample into and then once I finish resampling I move those samples to where I want them to permanently live. I also have another bank that I think of as the storage closet. I delete things that I know are messed up, but if I have left over bits that I may want later, I move them over to the last banks.
(5) For pattern chains, you only get 16 slots so you can run out, but remember you actually have 16 banks of pattern chains, so you could make two separate pattern chains, resample those and then either make those into pattern to chain or just resample them together into one sample.
(6) There’s been a lot of complaining about chromatic mode not working in pattern mode, but for now there is a pretty easy work around if you find it difficult to get your timing right playing live using the resample method. Basically once you’ve played around and know which notes you want (it’s probably not that many), just use resample to make a pattern chain of those three or four notes, chop those to notes pads, and then go into pattern mode and you can play them in with the luxury of undo and erase.
(7) If you are doing something complicated it’s easy to run out of mutes. I haven’t found a work around to that other than be efficient and don’t waste mute group slots. I wish you could have 32 pads per mute group instead of 16. It would make things a bit easier.
For long time SP users maybe some of this is just common sense, but this is all new to me.
