Pattern mode R4

Choose which pattern the selected track plays. Every pad is one of its 64 patterns — nothing to page.

• Tap a pad to make the track play that pattern. It switches immediately, keeping the playhead position. Pads read left to right and top down, so pad 1 is pattern 1 and the last pad is pattern 64.
• One pad is green: the pattern the track plays. There is always exactly one — a track plays one of its patterns and never none.
• The whole of a track’s choice is on screen. The grid is 64 pads and a track has 64 patterns, so nothing pages the patterns — there is no page to find, no page to remember, and no pattern you have to go looking for.
• B1–B8 pick the track and SHIFT + B1–B8 the track page, which is what the buttons do in Note mode, Scale, Params and Global settings too. Walking the tracks is the same gesture wherever you are, and the mode stays open while you do it, so you can give one track after another a pattern without being thrown anywhere.
• On tracks 1–5, rows 5–8 are the built-in bank — patterns 33–64 — and light amber instead of blue. Tap one and the track plays it at once; DUPLICATE copies it up to rows 1–4 to make it yours; CLEAR leaves it alone. On tracks 6–64 those rows are patterns of your own, blue like the rest, so such a track holds 64 of them where a banked track holds 32.
• SHIFT takes no pad row here. The rows the other modes claim — four of them for the step pages, the bottom one for mutes — are all still patterns, so a hand on SHIFT cannot turn a launch into a page change. The one thing it does do is open the pattern library, if there is one on the stick: every pad becomes a pack while it is held. On the buttons it means the same as in every other mode: SHIFT + R4 — this mode’s own button — opens Global settings, SHIFT + R1 the Scenes, and so on.
• A muted track’s whole grid dims, so it is plain why nothing is coming out of it while you try patterns against a scene. The mutes themselves are a bare press elsewhere — the mixer’s MUTE row, or the bottom pad row in Scenes — and they belong to the session, not to a mode: they stay as they are while you flip between patterns and scenes with SHIFT + R1 and R4, which is what makes auditioning a pattern inside a section work.
• CLEAR + pad clears a pattern. DUPLICATE + source + destination copies one — and because a pattern remembers which track it belongs to, you can press B1–B8 between the two taps to copy a pattern to another track.

The built-in bank

On tracks 1 to 5, patterns 33 to 64 — the bottom half of the grid, rows 5 to 8 — hold material that ships with the instrument instead of material you made. Tap one of those amber pads and the track plays it straight away: there is nothing to load, nothing to set up, and no page to go to first.

One role a track, and only the first five.

A track without a bank has twice as many patterns of its own — 64 rather than 32, the whole grid, since nothing is reserved on it. That is where to go when 32 of your own is not enough.

• The drum and fill patterns use the General MIDI drum map, and the pitched ones are in C minor, so a drum, a bass and a chord pattern picked at random sit together.
• All 32 slots of every role are filled — 160 patterns in all — and each is a bar of sixteenths or two, so they loop against one another.
• One page a family. Thirty-two names in a list is nothing to scan; four rows of eight is, so the row says roughly where you are before you read a pad. Page 5 is the eight that were always there, unmoved — anything you copied out of the bank before is still on the same pad.
• The bank is read-only. CLEAR will not empty it, the step pads will not edit it, and its patterns keep the length they ship with. To make one yours, hold DUPLICATE, tap the amber pad, then tap a pad in rows 1–4 — the ordinary pattern copy. Copying into the bank is refused.
• To stop a track playing one, give it something else to play. Because the bank is read-only, CLEAR cannot empty a factory pattern the way it empties one of yours, and a track always plays exactly one of its patterns — so there is no way to un-pick one. Tap any grey pad in rows 1–4 instead: an empty pattern of your own, which keeps the track running in step with everything else and plays nothing. That choice is saved with the project. For a quick silence mid-take, mute the track from the mixer’s MUTE row or Scenes’ bottom pad row, which dims its whole grid here; mutes belong to the session, not the project. Both work on any track, including one several track pages away that you landed on by mistake.
• It costs a project nothing. The bank is not part of one, so no project file carries it: an empty project is still 32 bytes with the whole bank available, and clearing a project leaves the bank alone. A track page’s button lights blue for your work only, so the bank does not make every page look busy.
• Not done yet: a factory pattern does not set the track’s preset, so a drum pattern plays notes 36–50 out of whatever channel and port the track already has. Wiring the roles to voices waits on the preset document.

The pattern library SHIFT + PAD

The bank ships with the instrument; the library comes off the stick. A folder of MIDI files is a pack, and the folders under patterns/ in the data directory are the packs, in name order. The names on the pads are the file names with the extension and any leading number taken off, so 01 four floor.mid is FOUR FLOOR — a pack is authored by naming files, with no index to keep in step.

• Hold SHIFT and the pads are the packs. Pad n is pack n wherever it sits, so a stick of thirty packs is thirty lit pads and the rest are dark, each naming itself on the panel. Tap one to open it; tapping the pad of the pack already open closes it again.
• An open pack takes the bank’s half, rows 5–8, in violet. Tap one of its patterns and the track plays it; tap a pattern of your own to go back. The pack owns the whole half while it is open, including the pads it does not reach — a pack holds 32 patterns at most, which is the half it opens over, and a folder with more in it is read up to there and says so.
• DUPLICATE + a pack pad + one of your pads writes it into that slot. That is the ordinary pattern copy, unchanged — which is the whole reason a pack opens on this grid rather than in a mode of its own: the destination is already under your hand, and you can press B1–B8 between the two taps to send it to another track.
• Which pack is open belongs to the track, so each one remembers its own and the lit pad can never point at another track’s.
• A MIDI file becomes a pattern on arriving, since a file says more than a step can hold: a step is a sixteenth, a note starts on the nearest step and what is left over becomes its micro-timing, its length becomes the gate (never INF — a file says how long its note is), notes landing on one step become its chord up to four with the rest dropped and counted, the pattern is as long as its last note rounded up to a whole bar, every track of the file is read into the one pattern and the channel and the tempo are ignored.
• Everything is read once, when the instrument starts. After that the stick is never touched again — no pad press, no track change and no frame of the screen can reach the disk, so a slow stick or one pulled out mid-set can do nothing worse than it already has. A file that will not read is refused at start-up, with a reason, and leaves no pad behind to press.