I think this would be an incredible performance feature. Imagine the scenario:
You have a four on the floor kicking away on B1. You have a continuous 16th note snare roll running on A1, with the volume fader all the way down. You’re approaching a transition, so you start fading in the snare roll. As the level increases, you obtain a powerful pumping effect from B1’s kick choking A1. But then; the crescendo! You need the snare to roll, only for half a bar, continuously and without the kick choke. So you…
Toggle to bank B, mute B1, then unmute after the bar, then toggle back to bank A, and turn the snare back down. Not exactly fluid. Certainly not something that can be achieved with any reasonably time-sensitive transitions. The time-effective alternative to this behavior is to solo the rolling snare in A1, but then you lose the rest of your instrumentation. Imagine if you could- just for example- hold ‘shift’ and ‘bank’ together, resulting in a flip of the bank’s choke behavior. Imagine the incredibly creative compositional approaches we could see from S2400 users with the above behavior at their fingertips!
If this feature ever does end up implemented, I would ask that whatever the toggle function be, that it be quick and one-handed, as this would be important for effective performative use. Maybe like ‘Press 7 in fader mode to switch and lock toggle behavior’. What do you guys think?
banks don’t have a “choke behaviour”, individual tracks have by virtue of their output channel assignment. For a kick to choke a snare they don’t have to be on A1 and B1 (or C1 or D1), you can make them choke each other on A1 and A2 just as well - just assign them to the same output and alternate channel (1-8)
Yeah, choking can be done within a bank, but my point wasn’t really about the best way to choke. Banks do have a choke behavior, as any alphabetically subsequent bank will choke any alphabetically antecedent bank. b1 will always override a1, and c1 will always override b1, etc.
So this is fantastic, after all it would be pretty inconvenient if you could put two simultaneous sounds on a single channel across two different banks, and never have any idea which sound you’re going to hear. Right now we know that we’ll hear whichever sound is on the last alphabetical bank. But, this serves really only as a “simple” choke behavior right now. However, if one had the ability to toggle the alphabetical order of the override, then one could have a central pattern playing out in bank B, and two performative variations in bank A and bank C, and do some really cool performances with that new function.
Yeah, absolutely! So the thing I might not have made clear is that I’m not asking “how can I make my snare roll do what I want”. Rather, I’m pitching an idea, and in fact the kick drum/snare roll iteration of that idea was just meant to be the simplest illustration of such an effect.
To be (hopefully) more clear, I’ll try to phrase it as such;
I want to write a variation of a pattern in bank B on bank A, and then press a shift function so that that variation chokes the initial pattern, as it would if it were on Bank C rather than bank A.
I’ve never made a video in my life, but I’ll see if I can figure out how to do such a thing and maybe upload a demo of what I mean. Because right now you can take this performance-variation approach by writing variations into bank C and muting them until it’s time for them, but a shift function would make this approach both faster and more expansive, as you would have two banks to write variations into rather than one.
Ahh, I understand now. Choke refers to pads and outputs. I agree that some way of hands on variations would be cool. I still think you can get the same affect with pattern changes.
Yeah you’re quite correct, in one pattern you could have variation 1, and in another variation 2.
Two advantages to override toggling, however, would be:
intrapattern changes.
Rather than playing through one pattern, and then playing through a second, and then playing through a third, then back to pattern two, etc., one could fluidly achieve momentary pattern variations, lasting only a 16th of a bar, or two bars, it’s totally up to you.
psuedo elektron-style sound swaps.
Have a piano stab playing an eighth note melody in a pattern? program the same melody for a trumpet in bank A, and now switch between piano and trumpet call-and-response style melodies at will. Or program interesting and wonky perc swaps throughout a drum pattern.
I haven’t played with the feature yet - but isn’t there mute and solo groups? Maybe that could work?
On the Electrons, how do you setup which patterns swap with which?
Yeah, so you can basically achieve the sound swapping already by placing your swaps in the latter bank and muting them. This way you can just play your regular pattern, and when you ready, jump over to the second bank and unmute the muted swaps. Now they’re overriding any concurrent sound on the same channel in the previous bank. A handy feature, but like I say, with the clunkiness of needing to swap banks and unmute, this effectively acts only as a choke/override feature.
It’s great if you have one timbre in your verse which you would like to permanently replace with another timbre in your chorus, but like you say, that’s the point of patterns. If you’d like to do spontaneous overrides then the feature is too time-intensive to do anything especially impressive, but the potential is definitely there to get some cool responses out of the device.
Obviously, a second way to do this would be to place your main pattern on bank B, and your swaps on Bank A. Then, when ready to swap, mute the sounds in your main pattern and the formerly overridden sounds in Bank A will play. This is the closest way to currently get what I’m after, but if you had one button to toggle the override behavior then it would be as simple as programming your variations and jamming out, not needing to think in the middle of a performance “ok, for this melody I’m muting channel 4, 6, and 7, in the third bar, right? Yeah, I think that’s right.” But lo, it was in fact channel 4, 6, and 8!