You know what I realised this enables? A Syntakt version of the Octatrack transition trick, so you can smoothly blend between patterns in a live set! It requires some prep and is not 100% smooth, but it works, and maybe we can work out ways to make it smoother.
Basically at a high level, we want to capture a 1 bar loop from pattern 1 using the freeze delay trick set to 1/1, then switch to pattern 2 and bring in the elements over the top of our loop, then fade the loop out.
In order for this to work, we need a “transition target” version of each pattern with the delay set to 1/1, feedback 100, no filter, and no tracks sent to the delay - so that when we switch to that pattern, the delay continues looping smoothly without decaying, and we aren’t adding extra elements to the delay.
You can then complete the transition with the delay filter or volume, and switch to the “full” version of the pattern with any delay you might want (this does result in a delay pitch change artefact - not sure what the best way round that is, maybe you could adjust the delay time after the transition but before you switch).
Obviously this kind of rules out using the FX block for other more creative uses (though I guess you could have a version of the pattern which uses the FX block normally, then when you are going to transition you switch to one where the FX block will just be used as a looper, like an “outro” version?).
A couple of things to note, this doesn’t handle tempo changes nicely so you’ll need to use global BPM or whatever to avoid artefacts. Also the looped version of the pattern doesn’t sound totally identical – not sure if there’s a way to balance the levels so that it does. You can also end up with clicks at the boundary, I put a slight fade in on the LFO for the sample trigger to avoid this.
Happy to write it out in more detail but it’s getting late so for now here’s a video - sorry for the lame captions, I couldn’t record me speaking as my partner’s asleep and I didn’t feel like learning how to use iMovie properly!
One tweak I realised you could do if you’re feeling adventurous is that rather than muting tracks to select what you are going to record into the loop, you could do this using the FX track input selector, if you want to prepare your loop a bit more in advance without changing what is audible.
Enjoy!