Pattern arrangement
This is the major weakpoint of drambo in its current iteration
You can copy and paste patterns but it's very clunky
Drag and drop patterns would be very nice to have
Also a dedicated pattern arrangement screen with the ability to mute individual tracks per loop would be very useful for composition once you have your patterns down
The pattern arranger in renoise is amazing...
Comments
The Renoise arranger is fantastic. The visual aspect really appeals to me. I'm not ashamed to admit I've also fantasied about organizing patterns like that in Drambo.
While I'm not generally a big user of trackers in a compositional capacity, I agree that a tracker-style arrangement window would be awesome (think Nanoloop's arranger). It's a very quick way to select groups of patterns with full control of mutes.
The only obstacle in this regard would be Drambo's current method of organizing patterns at the master level ie one pattern controls every track rather than having patterns on a per-track basis. Usually when I'm arranging, the patterns are offset so the drum pattern might remain the same while the other tracks are changing.
As it stands I have to do a fair bit of copy+pasting patterns and thinking in advance about what tracks I want to be together while I'm composing. With per-track pattern arrangement I can do all of the composition upfront and figure out the arrangement later, which I find to be much speedier and conducive to a positive result. Per-track patterns allow you to bang out ideas for each track as they come to you without any technical friction. It also removes technical friction from the arrangement side because you can try a ton of combinations without having to delete / copy / paste the tracks into each pattern.
It also lends itself to a more modular approach over the arrangement, which seems to fit into the overall ethos of Drambo.
I think the row of patterns on the top is nice, but it needs drag and drop. Then a separate screen which shows a grid of patterns and tracks, where you can sequence mutes and arrange (a la renoise)
What would actually be sick is different step amounts for individual tracks within each pattern. The Elektron sequencers which Drambo has been partly inspired by have this, it's a good way to achieve complexity within a simple framework.
With those things added it would be really good, it's close and it's simplicity is its strength, but atm it's not really usable for me to compose. Too much time spent copy and pasting to try out variations.
Oh, and making the scene slider a modulation target would be cool...
Been a cold minute since I used nanoloop! But yeah something like that would be dope, and very in keeping with what's there already I think.
Love the app, only thing missing is an expandable pattern arranger section with drag and drop, as mentioned above, but also an expandable PATTERN TRIGGER SECTION, similar to ABLETON LIVE would be nice. This would make Drambo the go-to app for almost all my needs, and would eliminate several steps in the workflow. 😁
The clip launcher in ableton is great. This is pretty obscure, but there is a eurorack sequencer called Nerdseq which has a really innovative song mode where you can cue chains of patterns on a grid. It's like a hybrid of a pattern arranger and a clip launcher. A multilinear timeline. It's the future!
Cool! Trackers are the way I started making music but at the time of the Amiga 500. 😎👍 NerdSEQ seems quite similar to Polyend Tracker. 😁 https://polyend.com/tracker/
Yeah that's a cute box:)