It seems there’s a lot to discuss in this thread. I don’t want to over do it, so apologies in advance if I start answering the wrong question.
The question I have is this: is anyone else doing anything similar which requires lots of different songs and how are you going about this? Putting all of the songs into separate projects doesn’t work because of the load time pause/glitch when clicking the “load/save” menu.
What’s this pause/glitch when clicking the load/save menu? You mean the little hiccup? Or is it the thing where you go to the load menu and then suddenly one of your prized devices stops playing? Anyways, I’m aware of those glitches, but I also don’t have 100’s of songs, I have 10’s of songs on a card.
I rarely need to play them all at any one time so I do a little bit of card management. My current thing is that I regularly copy them into a directory on my computer (which happens to be a git repostory). Anyways, I manage what’s on the card, the active playlist - at least if I’m playing live. When i’m just writing lots of music and not performing live the glitches don’t bother me and so I just amass songs on a card.
Though what I’ve found is the more songs on a card there can be subtle problems that start to occur. I’d recommend making sure you have a really fast SD card too, that also helps with load related glitches I find.
– So how do I organize songs though?
Most of the time I use a single song per file, I can put 40 on a card and mix between them in various ways so that’s usually fine. That said, sometimes I like to stack multiple songs on a single file - usually I do this when I’m re-using a lot of the same sounds. I like to do this because it provides additional mixing options, so I maybe stack 2 or more songs on a single file 10-15% of the time.
however I fear after adding 100 songs in 20 different projects I’m going to have a lot of trouble remembering which pattern goes to which songs/which part of a song, especially since I can’t name the patterns.
Yep. You need to build yourself a workflow. I do a lot of things the same every single song, in terms of the workflow so that I don’t have to remember what goes where.
So first and foremost, I always have the same track layout. Track 1 is always the same synth, on midi channel 1. The midi channels don’t always work out, but that’s fine - that’s why you have labels. Anyways, generally I have one page of tracks (say page A) is always the same thing. Then on page B i’ll do extra tracks where i’m doing weird things, usually I can remember that page B is something special.
If i’m stacking songs on a single file, like I mentioned before - I’ll do things like keep specific ranges of sequences as well as a page of tracks for a specific song. So let’s say I’m going to have 4 songs on a single file, what I might do is have Tracks page A be song 1, B be song 2 and so on. Then, for my sequences, I’ll have like 1-3 for Song 1, 9-10 for song 2 – I’ll put them in little blocks that are separated, this separation helps me remember that they’re probably separate songs when I come back to the file in 3 months (I write so much stuff I forget where things go, thus the system I use).
All of this organization is built on the way I like to use the squarp and play my synths - and this also depends on the type of gear you have, the way you’ve configured it, what priorities you set for how things are going to work in your synth ecosystem - so, ‘ymmv’ and you should experiment a bit.
Also, I think I saw something about you wanting to program your drums external to the squarp - I do that too - I use an analog rytm and I sequence all my drums on it. The squarp merely sends that a play/stop, I do the sequence changes on it manually, manipulate mute states and so on directly on the device. I love the squarp, but it’s not the best at everything so I like to play to the strengths of individual pieces of gear if I can.
Shoot, I hope I was answering the right question - anyways, good luck on your journey friend.