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MIDIbox SEQ V4 Beginner's Guide
MIDIbox - http://wiki.midibox.org/
5. Working with patterns and songs
5.1. Saving a pattern
When working with several patterns and in song mode, it is important to save often so as not to lose
by accident the changes you've made to the parameter and trigger layers and other settings of the
four tracks in a pattern. MBSEQv4 will not save anything automatically (every five minutes or
whatever), but instead you have to choose to save the changes yourself.
The primary way in which you'll lose your changes is bound up with switching patterns. Switching
from an active pattern without saving it first will mean losing the changes you made to it since the
last save. When you switch to another pattern within a group – from 1:A1 to 1:A2, for example – you
will lose the changes made to the track you are switching from – e.g. 1:A1 – unless you explicitly save
them first. The unsaved changes in the active patterns of the other groups won't be affected (they're
not being switched, after all).
However, starting the sequencer in song mode – either by pressing PLAY or automatically with the
Jam page function AStart – will erase the unsaved changes in the active patterns of all groups. But
once the sequencer is running in song mode, you can make changes to a pattern and not lose them,
on the condition that the pattern in question doesn't get switched to another one during the song. If it
does get switched, that is the moment you'll lose your unsaved changes.
You can choose to save only one pattern, or to save all active patterns. A single pattern can be saved
with MENU + SAVE (GPB14). The source pattern to be saved is always one of the four active patterns
(each group has one active pattern). With GPK1–4 you can choose the source group the active pattern
of which you want to save, and with GPK6 you can choose the target bank to save the pattern into.
Finally, with GPK7 you can choose which location within the selected bank the pattern is to be saved
into. There are 64 locations per bank to choose from (from A1–A8 to H1–H8).
In the right LCD you can see which locations are free and which ones already have saved content in
them. If the location is free, the entry for the location is “- - - - - <empty>”. If something has already
been saved in the location, even if you haven't given the previously saved pattern a name (like with
the 'Save All' function, see below), the entry for the location is “- - - - - Unnamed”.
When saving individual patterns with MENU + SAVE, you get a chance to give the pattern a category
and a label. The label could be named for the pattern's function in the song structure (“Intro”,
“Bridge”, “2nd Verse”, “VrseVariant3” etc.) and the category could be e.g. the synth you're playing
the pattern with, or the synth patch, or whatever helps you memorise the function of the pattern.
If you want to save all active patterns patterns at once, press EXIT until you arrive on the main page,
and then press GPB10 for 'Save'. This saves all the active patterns (and in fact the whole session).
This way you won't get to give any categories or labels to the patterns, but instead they will be saved
as “- - - - - Unnamed”, or under the name you have given them when saving them individually earlier.
You can also assign one of the F1–F4 buttons (right side of the frontpanel) to for a quick 'Save All'
function (see Appendix 1).
