Consolidating tracks? Means taking the output of a track with everything on it, notes, cc, effects etc and recording it to a new track. This opens up a entirely new world. As you can record ARPs/euclid to note data. Bake swing, scale etc to the track, and in essence, use more than 4 effects!
The idea: Loop the output of Pyramid back into the input of Pyramid, so you will be able to record it.
PS! This is very dependat on your personal setup as there are A LOT of ways to achieve this.
My setup is as following: I use a iCM4+ and do mostly all of the traffic on USB. I just took one DIN from the A output of Pyramid and hooked it straight back to the input of Pyramid. Creating a physical loop. Now if I want to “consolidate” a track that outputs to USB channel 1, I simply set that track channel as MIDI A (any channel), create a new track and set that output to USB channel 1. Activate new track and press REC and Play and done!
Love it. I honestly think it is a must have, or atleast any other iConnectivity box with the Squarp. It really simplifies your MIDI wiring and also powers the Pyramid. I have only one USB going from the Pyramid to the iCM4+, thats all. Very clean. Software takes a a little while to wrap your head around, but is totally worth it.
My experience with looping MIDI is not a good one, resulting in a bricked sequencer some years ago.
I’ve been told that too much MIDI will not kill a device and what happened to me was a coincidence (death of box at same time as an os freeze due to MIDI buffer overflow), but I now am very, very careful when looping MIDI.
It’s not a hard thing to ensure that there is no THRU happening on the Pyramid, though also not hard to over-look. Proceed with caution
This is basically implementing an internal bus. The Midibox has this and it’s very useful for a lot more than just recording or baking midi data although can get a bit complicated. Tbh Pyramid probably has the beginnings of such a thing when the Master Transpose was implemented.
I’ll echo what megamarkd said - make sure you have the midi thru on the Pyramid turned off before you attempt this. I’ve never bricked a sequencer this way but I have locked one up, losing all my unsaved work…
A safer way (but more tedious) is to record to an external sequencer, and then record back. (Doing this with audio tape is called an “external bounce”). If the Squarp team implemented this internally - resampling of midi tracks - that would be a great workflow enhancer.
(@megamarkd it might not have been a coincidence. It was (maybe still is) possible to brick some midi gear by sending it pathological sysex.)
May I know, how do you record from an external sequencer into Pyramid? Since this is what i’ve been trying to do for the last couple of days, without any good result…
