Selecting a specific place to begin playback

Pyramid
1

Greetings,

While editing in step mode, in the lower left of the screen there is the one or more rectangles that represents the pages that make up the track being edited. Then there’s the downward facing arrow that shows which page you are currently viewing/editing on the 16 pads. If I am mid-pattern and press stop, make an edit, then press play again, the sequence starts from the beginning of the current page.

Is there a way to select exactly where the playback begins? After pressing stop, instead of the playback going to the beginning of the page, can I select for example- step pad 5 of the current page to be the beginning of playback?

Thanks

1 Like
2

no.
as you say, the pause/resume, just goes back to beginning of the last page it played.

3

Hi, thanks for your response.

Another related question- if a track has, for example, 5 pages and I play it from the top until the 4th page then press pause. Is there a way to select the top of the 2nd page to be where it begins playback when I press play again?

4

@thetechnobear

5

is that not the same question :slight_smile:

unfortunately, there is no way to manually position the ‘play head’…
it really is just start/stop pause/resume.

you could ask Squarp to perhaps consider this as a feature request via the contact page.

I should say, I think I can understand why the Pyramid does not allow this (or at least one reason)

the USP of the pyramid is its fantastic handling of polymeters and polyrythms.

so unlike a conventional daw timeline, you cannot really say ‘start on Bar 18’,
because you could have tracks that are are looping at different lengths…

imagine you have a track with 3 bars, 7 bars, 2 bars, 10 bars… where does each track start on bar 18?
but its even more complicated than that !.. its not just track lengths, every track can have a different time signature!

so to play consistently you have to do a lot of calculation (that is NOT required to play thru a track)

then there is the complication in the UI…
lets say the UI was hold play and press a step , to play from that step…
you have now only told ONE track where to start…
so if I in the above example, if I press bar 3 or track 2 (7 bar) , this give no information on where we are in the other tracks.

basically this means there can be no consistent UI…
users would have very different ideas about what it ‘should be doing’ in various scenarios.

this is a common issue I see with feature requests for the Pyramid.
sure, they make sense in simple scenarios where tracks lengths are the same length/signature … but they don’t take into account the complexities allowed by the pyramid…

you cannot just ‘ignore’ these, saying they are edge cases - since as soon as you (as a developer) implement a feature you are expected by others in the user base to handle these edge cases.
frankly, if you cannot do it ‘properly’, then you should not do it all - as hard as that sounds to some users who want a ‘simple feature’

… of course , you could argue , it should just do this, or do that… but really that’s for Squarp to decide, what is reasonable , knowing how its user base uses the pyramid.

6

@thetechnobear

Thanks for explaining. It’s something I frequently wish I could do while editing so I figured I’d ask. Maybe a way it could work would be if you could somehow select a dominant track, where all other tracks refer to that tracks timing / bar placement etc?

7

I feel similarly.

Perhaps if there was a setting that enables navigation, and it only applies to patterns that don’t loop.

I’d be fine with this compromise as generally looping tracks are “textural” and the idea is we just want to be able to hear edits made to long patterns without having to listen to the entire section or song.

Playing back the current sequence or the song from the beginning would reset all tracks’ sync as usual. But otherwise it just tries to quantize the start positions to the bar or something.

Seems like a reasonable workflow.

I’m a little confused though because I think you can kind of already do it to a limited extent. Not across sequences but if you play back after moving within the step sequencer other tracks will follow along. Been a couple weeks since I played with Pyramid.

8

Or maybe once you’ve solo’d the track you’re editing you can then do this feature…

9

I think placing ‘requirements’ on to it working would just create more confusion, and so more support requests/bug reports.
(my experience is users report things as bugs, even when they don’t work as they think they should)

the ‘obvious’ solution is to just playback tracks as if this was the first time thru…
so going back to an example
T1 5 bar
T2 2 bar
T3 4 bar
T4 10 bar

if you are on T4, and you play bar 7, then it would play
T1 bar 2
T2 bar 1
T3 bar 3
T4 bar 7

this would at least be consistent… but I do still think people would report it as a bug.
imagine, they had let this sequence play thru 3 times…
they hear something that ‘clashes’ , and want it to play again
… but it reverts back to the 1st play, and now they have to wait 3 iterations to hear it again.
instant bug report : “replaying should playback identically to time before”

it doesn’t matter we can say 'er, but… ’ this was a compromise, at that time, because its not what they want… they will see it as a bug.
also frankly, in the above example, many are going to be confused about why tracks started as they did.

we have seen this quite clearly, then we talk about offsets, and how they adjust start position… many don’t understand why it works as it does, think its a bug that needs fixing - because it’s not as they want.
but if you understand it, it’s perfectly logical.
(for sure, it could be extended, and allow offset editing… but its not a bug)

… its hard, polyrythms/polymeters can be confusing!

anyway, this its all really a moot point,
whilst we can have our thoughts on ‘good solutions’ , its the Squarp Dev team that have to decide.
a) they are very experienced in this area, so will have strong ideas or what works, and not… and also what the user base general expects etc.
b) they know what’s feasible given the current code base.

so Id really encourage you to talk to them…

I think the basic issue of "Ive a long playing sequence, Id like to be able to play back from bar X, whilst editing’ , is something they will appreciate… and by talking to them, perhaps they can come up with other solutions/suggestions we have not covered here.

my thoughts above, are really just an effort to explain what I think are some of the complexities… so hopefully that conversation with Squarp can be more fruitful :slight_smile:

1 Like
10

The thing is, you can do it, I remember now you press play-stop-play and it will start from wherever you are in the step editor with everything in sync. You obviously you can’t navigate across sequences this way but you can break your song up into sections and don’t have to listen all the way through to hear changes.

11

Are you talking about in Edit Mode? Can you explain more about what you mean by play-stop-play? You press the three quickly? …not working for me.

Thanks
-w

12

Just tested it and it definitely works.

Go into STEP mode on a longer pattern, and move to any page. Then hit play, then stop, then play again. It will play from the active page, with all the other tracks in sync.

Not sure if it’s in the manual.

13

Ah, after trying it out on other tracks, it seems the pattern must be in FREE run mode for it to work.

Any other run mode will cause the pattern to play from the beginning.

14

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