Muting patterns in a chain

[FernandoParticipant]

Hi All,
First of all thank you so much for making Zaquencer firmware available to the public, it is excellent. I bought a BCR2000 just for it.

But there are some things that I cannot seem to find on the manual or maybe my english is not as good to understand it (all in all I find the manual very technical and not much user friendly, more on that later).

1)QUESTION I have 4 sequences chained using 3 tracks, then I mute a track, let’s say for example Track 1 which is Chords. When it jumps to the next pattern it gets un-muted. Same goes for Drums instruments on the drums track (Track 3 in my case). Is there a way to set it so that it will keep any pattern on the track muted no matter if it changes pattern? Same for drum instruments? Cause otherwise I cannot have a mute interval larger than 32 steps.

2)Regarding the manual: since Zaquencer is a download and people only get the overlay stickers days or weeks after installing the firmware, it would be nice if the manual was written for unlabeled BCR2000s. It’s hard to find the right encoder for each of the settings in the Main menu and for other features, especially because the “pictures” in the manual only show 4 buttons at a time, labeled with the overlay which I don’t have, and so it takes me a long time to find out what set of buttons it is referring to.

Maybe if you added better “hints” for the users it would be easier to learn and use the Zaquencer until the overlay sticker arrives. For example, instead of saying just “Load” button, present a picture of a whole BCR2000 (not just a part of it) with an arrow saying where the load button is and its original name (“Learn”) too.

Also for the encoders, it would be nice to have the number of the encoder for each of the settings. For example, where you talk about the global grid feature, you could say it is on “the 11th encoder from top to bottom, left to right”. Much easier to find it when you don’t have the overlay sticker yet. I tweaked a lot of settings I did not want to play with until I found the right encoder.

And finally on the installation instructions, please provide a screenshot of the MIDI-OX software showing where to tweak the settings for the buffer, delay and what not. I’ve been playing with MIDI hardware a long time and never had to use a software like that to transfer firmware, and I felt a bit lost and insecure at first – I was afraid doing something wrong could corrupt my hardware.

[ChristianKeymaster]

Hi Fernando,
thank you for getting in touch!
Regarding your question, the mutes are part of the pattern and are stored in flash.
As the pattern chain functionality recalls patterns from flash, this also will recall the mutes. We designed it this way for two methods of operation:
A) you could arrange with the mutes on/off, and store a different pattern each time => the arrangement would be recalled
B) in a more live/jam focused environment we recommend using the mutes of your sound generator equipment, either in the analog domain (a small mixer) or in the DAW the trackmutes if you are working with softsynths.
I´ll admit that non-recalling mutes on the Zauquencer would be desirable, but my worries were that it´s counter-intuitive to have 2 sets of mutes, that might be conflicting (wait, what? which mute is active right now? why is my track not playing?). It seemed more intuitive to have that set of mutes outside the Zaquencer.

Thanks for your recommendations for the manual.
Good stuff in there and I´ll see what I can put in the next time I go over the manual.

[FernandoParticipant]

Hey! Thanks for the reply.

The thing about muting Tracks in Zaquencer/BCR is that I’ve been using Tracks 1 and 2 as different melody layers that control a Minibrute. If I want to mute one of these layers for a period longer than 32 steps I can’t. And in that case I can’t mute the Minibrute since that would kill both layers. Also, if I’m using a soft or hardware synth for pads, for example, muting the outgoing notes on the Zaquencer allows the release to go for as long as I want to, while muting the synth cuts that effect. Anyway, I could go on and on about situations were muting the MIDI notes is better than muting the synth. This is my only gripe with Zaquencer so far.

One thing I’ve been thinking that could help this, maybe, is if you provided grid intervals longer than 4 bars? And while the interval is not reached, the current pattern just loops? For the type of music I make having 16 bars of mute would be wonderful.

For now I’ll try to make versions of my patterns with muted elements and see how that works. Thanks for the help

[alien_brainParticipant]

i agree that this is not my favorite part of zaquencer design. if mutes were not stored with the pattern, we can still make patterns with empty tracks for arrangement purposes.

[ChristianKeymaster]

Thanks for chiming in, Alien.
I remember we talked about this before.

I do understand where you are coming from with that request, but I´m still looking for ways to solve this without compromising intuitivity.

I had a quick idea, do you guys think this may be the solution?
Instead of introducing another set of mutes or messing with the logic of the existing ones (overriding etc), what do you think about a mode-switch (most likely global) that determines if a pattern-load (as well as pattern-chain-progression) also recalls the stored mutes or not. This way everything is possible, and still intuitively, no?

Fernando could you please elaborate on the “grid intervals longer than 4 bars” idea?
I didn´t really understand this part.

Cheers!

[rempesmParticipant]

Having a global parameter for that sounds like the perfect way to deal with it, Zaq.

I use the Zaquencer in both fashions, i.e. for putting together a track and for live jamming. For the former, I want to be able to have mutes ‘pre-programmed’ into the patterns as I’m sequencing everything up. When I’m just messing about, it would be much more intuitive to not have to worry about mutes on the Zaquencer when I’m chaining together patterns on the fly. I’d rather just fuss about with channel faders / mutes on my mixer in that scenario.

Fernando, to hopefully answer your query about grid intervals longer than four bars, you may want to have another look at the way the Clock Divider works in conjunction with tracks on different clock rates.

You could, for example set the Clock Divider on to ’1′ on your ‘mute’ track and that would essentially give you 32 bars of a mute. If your other tracks are on higher clock rates, e.g. ’16′ or ’32′, they will play through and just loop until the track with the lowest clock rate reaches the end of its sequence.

Of course, you would need to have patterns chained up for this to be of any real use but I think this sounds like what you are after.

[FernandoParticipant]

@zaq (Chris?),
That solution sounds perfect! I believe that would make us able to mess around with the instruments and tracks layers in a more flexible way.

Regarding the grid thing (which I think is far too complex and you solution is way better), what I was suggesting would be a feature that would set how many loops a given pattern will play through until it reloads itself from memory. Just like we set the length of a pattern, we could be able to set up to how many times it loops. And then if we chained the patterns, we could have patterns go like this, for example:

Pattern 1 – loops 2 times
P2 – 4 times
P3 – 1 time
P4 – 8 times
ETC…

Which would basically consist of a song-writing mode, I guess.
But the thing would be that during that interval of so many loop bars set for each pattern it would loop without reloading itself from memory and therefore allowing for over 4 bars of muted tracks, instruments, notes, etc.
And if you always wanted it to reset, you’d just set the loop times to 1.

@rempesm
I still have to get around playing with the Clock Divider. I read about it on the manual but I thought it was a bit confusing so I need to see it in action. One thing you said is confusing me though, didn’t you mean to say “32 steps of a mute” instead of “32 bars”? Because if I can have 32 BARS of a mute in a pattern that is looping, then that’s more than enough for my needs. I usually need 8 or 16 bars.

[rempesmParticipant]

Hi Fernando,

It’s really worth having a play around with the Clock Divider. It really opens up some interesting rhythmic possibilities on the Zaquencer.

From my understanding of it, the Clock Divider determines how its respective track interprets the MIDI clock and it either divides down or multiplies up the rate at which that track moves to the next step. I’m sure there’s a technically more precise way to put it but that’s how it seems to work for me.

For example, if you set one track’s Clock Divider to ’1′, then each step is equal to one whole note which will indeed give you 32 bars of mute if all steps are active. Conversely, if you set that track’s Clock Divider to ’32′, you would only have one whole note for all 32 steps as each step is equal to a 32nd note.

If you wanted the whole pattern to have less bars, you could either change the Clock Divider value to another value, e.g. ’2′ for 16 bars with each step equaling a half note, ’4′ for 8 bars with each step equaling a quarter note, etc., or simply use the Skip Step function to cut out the steps you don’t want.

I would say it is vital to get familiar with the Clock Divider and Skip Step functions as well if you are interested in doing anything fancier than 4/4 time signatures.

[FernandoParticipant]

@rempesm
Ahhh this is really interesting as I write a lot of 3/4 techno and was wondering if I’d be able to do so in Zaquencer. Thanks for the reply I’ll take some time to study it next weekend or whenever I have free time.

[MartinParticipant]

3/4-techno?
Is that a thing? if so, I should investigate… recently discovered something called “Three-Step” and that was pretty damn cool.

+1 for the optional “recall mutes with pattern yes/no” switch, by the way!

[FernandoParticipant]

Martin, it is a thing to me – https://soundcloud.com/loqvst/t-e3-work-in-progress

@rempesm – The Clock Divider trick works really well, thanks. However I always need to have one of the tracks with a really slow divider setting which pretty much limits the zaquencer to 3 tracks.

[closeParticipant]

Regarding the overlay: I printed the “Inverse” pdf on plain paper, used scissors to cut parts and attached it with scotch tape. Works perfectly.

[Author]

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