A stupid question

[pictobug]

Apologies for this but the manual's great at telling you what things do but absolutely useless at telling you HOW to do things in practice. So I have a LOT of stupid questions but I'll stick with this one for now.

I only got my M50 a few days ago and am a bit puzzled about creating drum tracks.

What I want to be able to do is lay down an entire drum track for a song (in the same way I might record a whole songs-worth of piano in one go) on the sequencer. I have a feeling you can only create phrases of drum patterns and stitch them all together, which is a horrible way of working as the drums in a few of my tunes change all the way through the song, so I'd like to be able to do a whole song in one go and make the changes as I record. Hope I'm explaining this clearly enough.

On my old Roland XP-50, it was straightforward, you just picked the track to record drums on, start recording and stop whenever you wanted, I'm not sure if I can do that on this!?

Any help would be appreciated.

[BasariStudios]

If i understood you correctly what you want is described in the manual in the
biggest and easiest details, in both, M3 and M50 but sometimes we tend to
be lazy and not find it. What you want is possible only in the convenient and
usual ways as on any other sequencer or DAW but not possible in way we think
and create on our own. Sometimes we also tend to missunderstand and
overestimate or underestimate certain thing as in the case of the DrumTrack now.
It clearly states that its a helper for creatng fast and easy composition, saving
and stamping your ideas for later use and devellopment in sequencing.
I dont know the length of the DrumTrack, the longest i've used is 16 Bars,
maybe its more but it works as any other track, you record as long as you
want and its not necesarilly a LOOP but you record what you want in it.
On the other hand, why use a DrumTrack which is not meant to do all that???
(Which is why i said what i said in the above statements). You need to use a
regular Track in the sequener for Drums and record it as any other tracks,
turn it on and record as long as you want, same as with the Piano track.
I dont really understand your question in the way you expressed it but if
you planing to use a Piano track in the old fashioned way then why use the
DrumTrack but not just a regular track to make yur life easier?

[Daz]

On my old Roland XP-50, it was straightforward, you just picked the track to record drums on, start recording and stop whenever you wanted, I'm not sure if I can do that on this!?

That's exactly what you do on the M50 In a nutshell ...

1) Go into SEQ mode

2) Hit the Page Select button and select P6 Track Edit. From the menu in the top right hand corner select the option Set Song Length and set how many measure your song is going to be (default = 64). Hit the Page Select button again and select P0-1 Play/Rec page (takes us back to the first page)

3) Select the track you want to record to using the current track selection field marked A in my screenshot below.

4) Select the sound you want to use for a track using the field marked B in my screenshot below (in this case setting the sound for Track 1)

-- at this point hit keys on the keyboard you will hear the sound assigned to the currently selected track and also be able to play that sound over whatever you've recorded so far. Hit START/STOP and rehearse over what you've done so far if necessary --

5) Hit REC button and then START/STOP button on the front panel ... after 2 measure count-in, play your heart out Hit START/STOP when done.

-- at this point if you fluffed up your last take, hit the Compare button and you'll go back to where you were before you recorded --

6) Go back to step 3 and repeat for next track. You may need to hit LOCATE on the front panel to rewind to the beginning, before recording next track.



p.s. screenshot is from the M3, the M50 is the same pretty much barring the colour scheme

Daz.

[BasariStudios]

Daz, whats the maximum Bar length of the Pattern Track?
I've done only up to 16 Bars.

[pictobug]

Thanks a lot for that, Daz. I shall give it a whirl this week. I must've mis-read something in the manual to make me think only drum phrases were possible. I do tend to skim when it comes to manuals.

[Daz]

Skimming is a hell of a lot better than not reading 'em at all