Manually Restart Track

Pyramid
1

Since mutes do not start or stop a track/pattern, merely prevent their signal from being output, I have been trying to figure out how I can manually trigger a reset on a single track on the fly without disturbing the playback of other tracks or altering a currently active sequence. Ideally this behavior would respect the “delay” sync settings and not actually reset until the beginning of the next bar.

The “Default Track mode” settings, which can control whether a track “relatches” upon sequence change are handy, but a bit of a hammer that one may not want to commit to on every single sequence change. And if I time something incorrectly when performing live, I want to know that I can just mute that track, reset it, and bring it in on the next bar.

This seems like it should be trivially easy, but I cannot find it documented anywhere.

2

I’m not sure I completely understand what you’re attempting to achieve, nor what steps you have taken to resolve this conflict. Apologies.

What it seems to me that you are asking, if I may paraphrase using my own terminologies perhaps:

  • You start a SEQ that includes a number of Tracks in a Mute/Unmute state
  • After playing the SEQ, you wish to start a Track from “1” without restarting the SEQ or starting a new SEQ, which would restart all Relatch’d Tracks from “1”, which you don’t want to do.

Perhaps an example is that you’ve reached a section of a performance or song that starts with drums and bass, and a few bars into it you wish to start a Track that includes melody after a few repetitions. You do not want to restart the drums & bass from the beginning of their Track, but you want the melody to begin at the “1” of it’s note/cc data.

If you accidentally start the melody at the wrong part, you wish to “turn off” the melody and restart it, you do not want the drums & bass to restart.

If that is the case, I dont’ see why you don’t just create your SEQ, set your melody Track to Relatch and leave it Muted in the SEQ. Then start the SEQ. When it’s time to bring the melody in, go to [Track] and unmute the melody track. That doesn’t restart the SEQ.

I’m assuming what you’re asking is much more complex than this, and apologies if I’ve overlooked something in your description. All of this info I’ve mentioned above is available in the manual under Run Modes and appropriately enhanced with ‘trying a few things’. However I do understand that some of the terminologies are frighteningly and annoyingly confusing because “Mute/Unmute” are not technically a Mute/Unmute but more a sort of modified [Play] (in my head at least). Further, I use the term ‘sequence’ (and have for years…umm…decades?) as any bit of note or CC info and…well, it just decays into bizarreness. Perhaps the dementia is setting in for me sooner than expected. heh heh

If that doesn’t resolve your query, I’m probably just not understanding. Apologies, again.

Ummm…it can get much more complex if you wish. I use Relatch Mode almost exclusively, but run parallel tracks for many instruments and switch between them using Chance Effect and external CC control from a button controller (MIDI Dispositivo + a BomeBox currently, but planning on hacking the code on the Dispositivo to send the correct CC’s natively). This also allows me to group Tracks and Mute/Unmute multiple Tracks on the fly. You can also do this with the Pyramid Encoders.

That is, if you want the melody Track to NOT start at “1” when you Unmute it from the [Track] page, but you want it playing parallel with the other tracks, but just not voice/sound (ie no data sending out), then set all the Tracks to Relatch mode and set a Chance Effect on the melody track. When chance is 0%, the Track will be playing, but the chance for any note to happen is zero. Setting that to 100% then sends the note data out. You can set an Encoder to this, the Touchpad (truth: I don’t use the Touchpad so far so I’m assuming), or any incoming external CC, etc.

3

I appreciate the reply, very detailed! You describe a good example of why one might want this, but unfortunately the solution you propose sounds much more complex than I am hoping for. I am specifically hoping for a way to restart a specific track (and only that track) during a live performance. Your solution sounds great during the songwriting phase in one’s studio. But it strikes me as a bit too complex to execute seamlessly on the fly in front of an audience.

I’ll admit, I have only been using the Pyramid for about a month or so and have barely scratched the surface of SEQ mode. But after my first few bewildered sessions with the machine, the flow of Step & Track modes (and later Patterns) clicked with me and I’ve really come to like the performability of the Pyramid. It feels like an instrument and I’m hoping to be able to use it as such, which inherently means (to me) elements of improvisational performance mixed in with pre-planned and prepared sequences. And when improvising, it’s a guarantee that sometimes things will not go perfectly, and being able to quickly recover and get back into the groove as if nothing was ever wrong makes all the difference in the world when an audience is watching. (Then you repeat the “mistake” again intentionally and boom it was a part of the song all along heehee) And quickly restarting an individual track from “one” without disturbing anything else seems like a fundamental mechanism for that recovery.

That said, this may actually be what you intended also, and the steps you describe here:

" create your SEQ, set your melody Track to Relatch and leave it Muted in the SEQ. Then start the SEQ. When it’s time to bring the melody in, go to [Track] and unmute the melody track. That doesn’t restart the SEQ."

are something that you consider totally doable in a matter of a couple of seconds by someone who has mastered the Pyramid’s workflow? To me, there are a couple of actions in there that would take me longer than I’d like, but as I said I’m still a novice with this device.

Still though - what you describe is orders of magnitude more involved than, say, holding the track’s pad and pushing (for example) 2nd + Play. The Pyramid lets you do so many deep actions with lightning quick button presses, why not this trivial one?

This basically says it all: if your “Play Pad” setting is set to “Play/Restart” (which I think is the default), you can simply press Play at any time during playback to seamlessly restart every track. All I want is a way to do that, but have it only affect a single track.

If it only takes a single button push to perform an action on all tracks, I would hope that it would be roughly as simple to execute that same action on one track.

But if there’s not a quick way to do this, maybe it’s for good reason? Regardless, I know that I still have plenty of room to improve with the device. Perhaps once I’ve reached the point where I’m as comfortable with the Pyramid as I am with a piano or subtractive synth, I’ll look back at this thread and scoff at my own foolishness.

  • Ryan