Moving whole section of a song: but song automation stays in place??

edited February 2018 in General

When I move patterns in song mode the song automation stays in place! Is there a way to move a section of a song with the song automation for every track at once?? I can’t believe I have to do this manually for every cc in every track... I can’t find how to do this in the manual....

Comments

  • edited February 2018

    Hi @SlowwFloww

    Automation can be recorded to the track or inside a pattern. If it's on the track it has no connection to any of the patterns, will always stay in that spot, and cannot be selected unless you open the track automation lane. This often causes confusion, and is poorly explained in the manual. The most annoying thing is if you want to relocate track automation to a different location - be prepared for a lot of copy/paste!!

    If you want to ensure the data is always stored in the pattern my advice is to put the pattern in loop mode when recording the automation. You can do this by opening the pattern selector and selecting the pattern before hitting record.

    Note also - if there is a clash between automation data on the track and pattern, the track automation always overrides the pattern automation data.

    This has been discussed many times already in the forums, and is one of the key areas that needs lots more development attention, IMHO.

    I recommend reading this thread in particular, which explains the issue and solutions in greater detail:
    https://intua.net/forums/index.php?p=/discussion/comment/28996
    (make sure to checkout @Ronji's explanation and video in that discussion too!)

  • edited February 2018

    Hi @tk32

    Thanx for yr reply..

    So it’s best to ‘duplicate’ patterns instead of ‘repeat’ when arranging a song.. That way you can record automation in ‘unique’ patterns....preventing the same automation to be heard in every instance of a pattern...

    I hope they offer us a ‘lock automation to patterns’ in song mode soon, just like in Ableton Live..

    I really want Beatmaker to be perfect.. no more crashes or other buggy stuff.. It has so much potential... It’s my main app besides Caustic.. I like it a lot.. But sometimes I wonder if the developers actually make music themselfes, how can they forget to offer automation locking, you really need that when composing songs....

  • edited February 2018

    There's not really a best practice. It depends on what you need.

    If you want each copy of the pattern to have completely different automations then duplicating may be the solution, but if you wan't a more continuous control (for example, a slow filter sweep) try the following instead...

    1. Say you have a 4-bar pattern (Pattern 1) and you want to automate controls over a 16-bar section/phrase:
    2. Repeat your 4-bar pattern until you have four of them, then select all 4 copies of Pattern 1 and 'Merge' (this function appears in the bottom-right corner whenver you select more than one pattern)
    3. You will now have a new 16-bar pattern (Pattern 2) which you can put in loop mode and record automations in. However, remember that any changes to the original Pattern 1 will not be updated in Pattern 2 (this is obvious, but worth mentioning)
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