I recently picked up a Hermod and I’m using it to drive a small modular rack for ambient/melodic techno kind of stuff.
I’ve got a question about workflow.
Within a project, I’ve got sequences set up to manage the various phases of a piece. I’m then moving through those sequences on the fly. The set up currently is four voices: bass plus three doing lead/chord/weird stuff and three tracks for percussion. Last track is providing clock plus triggers for a looper.
Each sequence will have tracks set up with the appropriate notes, pattern etc. I’m also using the sequence changes to mute/unmute tracks. So for example, seq 1 has some chords stabs on track 2, lead on track 3 and kick/hat on tracks 5 and 6. It’s set up so that at first only 2 is unmuted. Then I can bring in the lead and percussion by unmuting. After a bit I’ll move to seq 2 which brings in bass on track 1, plus some changes to the percussions and arps.
I tend to compose through jamming. So I often find myself in a position where I’m halfway through the set – sequence 4 say, and want to tweak/change the notes in an lead pattern. So I do that, but if I then save the project, it saves all the states of the track mutes, so my seq 1 gets saved with the track mute state that I got to when I left seq 1, rather than the initial state.
So what I end up having to do is keeping a note of the initial track mute states for each sequence, then once I’m done tweaking, work through each sequence resetting those to what I want and then saving.
This all works, but it feels a bit sub-optimal. Am I just working in a way that doesn’t fit with the Hermod philosophy/workflow or is there some feature/setting that I could make better use of? I do quite like the association of track mutes to sequences as it makes it easy to make big transitions, stripping everything back or bringing everything in for a drop. But it’s fiddly getting it all set in place.
Thanks!