no threats or insults here, but a proposal for expanding Sections vis a vis Songs in Pattern mode . . .
after working a bit with Sections and building up a Song, the pros/cons from the standpoint of trying to build up a basic dance track:
pros – like other modes and functions on Hapax, Sections make compiling various Patterns across multiple Tracks into a Song much faster and easier to keep track of than the Sequence mode on Pyramid. if this is the limit of Song construction in Hapax, it’s already a great addition
cons – unless i’m mistaken, a given Section is ultimately still a collection of mute states for Patterns across all 16 tracks, i.e., either a Track is mute or it’s triggering a single Pattern for that Section. which seems to make the use of Patterns less efficient than it could be in constructing a song.
confining a given Section to one Pattern per Track translates into either (1) more Sections or (2) more intricate Patterns if you need to accommodate discrete changes across parts of a track, e.g., if you want to go from just a Kick drum → Kick + OHH → Kick + OHH + CHH → Kick + OHH + CHH + Clap as an intro that’s four 4 or 8 beat Patterns or a single 256 beat Pattern (that you can’t easily use later). it’s not the end of the world if this is the only way to compile Sections but i think it could also be helpful if the Hapax grid was used for more than freezing mute states for Patterns by Track.
in the current iteration, if you want to create a Section from Pattern mode, you seem to be limited to this universe of binary Patterns (either active and selected or muted) across the 16 Tracks. for lack of a better term I would call this the “Scene” view of Pattern mode:
someone else suggested in another thread giving each Pattern and/or Track its own unique color, which i think could possibly open up Sections to more than arranging mute states for a given Pattern/Track. so that the Pattern view would then look more like this (hard to tell from the photo but basically each pattern number would be assigned a unique color in the same way each note is assigned a unique color in Live/Step modes):
then, if you had an “Arranger” view in Pattern mode that essentially rotates the 16 tracks 90 degrees, you could program multiple Patterns across each Track for a given Section in the same way you enter notes in Step mode. so for a typical Intro section from the Patterns above, a 16-bar Section might look like this: P1 from Track 6 runs for the full length of the Section while P5 from Track 10 doesn’t come in until bar 8 and the runs alongside P1/T6 for the remainder of the Section.
and in the same way we can scroll right in Step mode when a Pattern is longer than a single bar, we could scroll right as far as necessary depending how long a given Section is set to be. also scrolling up and down between the 16 Tracks per Project, but since Pattern color would be uniform across track, no need to assign different Tracks different colors as well.
basically, Step mode for Patterns, which I think would allow for dynamic Sections when constructing a Song
… but certainly more sections that there are row buttons.
