Wow, that¡¯s really cool about the 24 part
synth concept¡
Thanks for all of the excellent information!
My pleasure! There are all sorts of nooks and crannies and tricks under the hood. For example:
1) Set a pattern to a length of 1 bar in 4/4 time
2) Enter a note of the same pitch on each track, shifted by an eighth note each time you increment the track (i.e. the first drum track has a note on 1:1:000, the second on 1:1:240, third on 1:2:000, etc)
3) Insert a maximum pitchbend message at the start of each track
4) Set all the tracks to the same type of voice (I like the single element sine wave)
5) Set the pitchbend range to '0' for each voice (can do graphically on the voice edit page...it's the tall vertical slider on the lower left)
6) Pull down all the sliders to 0
Congrats, you've made a realtime parameter tweakable step sequencer. Each voice will sound on each eighth note in turn, so by raising the volume on one of the tracks, you are activating that 'step'. And you can tweak the tone played on each step by messing with the voice parameters in realtime.
To change the pitch of a step, select its track and change the pitchbend sensitivity. Because of the max pitchbend message, adding or reducing sensitivity makes the sound increase or decrease, in intervals of a minor second (half step).
That 'Sound On Sound' series suggests a similar thing, but without pitchable steps, iirc. It's presented using different voices for use as a monophonic percussion sequencer.
If you want 16 steps, do the same thing in Song mode, just copy the bar a zillion times and it will simulate looping. If you get comfortable with the Sysex and controlling multiple parts with one track, you can get up to 24 steps (although the last 8 wouldn't be graphically editable).
