Question

Back in the dark ages of DOS when we called it a MIDI sequencer instead of a digital audio work station,
I had a sequencer program that allowed you to loop an individual track. We had the ability to loop a whole section of
tracks just like we do now, but this was the ability to loop individual tracks.

I guess it would be the notation equivalent to putting in the begin and end repeat signs and saying repeat these 4 bars 32 times. From that point, it would essentially be an empty space on the track for 32 iterations and would automatically place the next entries at the correct position on the page.

If you changed your mind and only wanted to repeat 16 times, you could change the repeat number and it would shift everything to fit.
And of course, you could do this with any and multiple tracks.

It would be nice to be able to record 4 or 8 bars of something then instead of copy/pasting it X number of times, just place a repeat on it and have it loop X number of times.

Answer 1

Thank you for the feature request. 

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Answer 2

Yes please! This would be a huge timesaver, especially when writing songs quickly! It would help the user to work faster and stay in the creative zone while coming up with melodic ideas, lyrics and other instrument parts.

 

Adding to this idea:

It would be great if sections/events would also be able to loop indefinitely until you press Stop or consciously make left-brain decisions about section lengths/arrangements and other technical stuff. The computer can do this for you until you choose to focus on that. Then you would not have to waste precious mental energy thinking about song lengths, numbers of copy/paste and such while in a creative flow. You are free to be musical creative about melodies, lyric ideas etc. Freestyling over loops can be very creative.

 

For example, lets say you start of a new song idea by quickly recording 1 bar of a drumbeat and 4 bars of bass and S1 would then let you loop these seamlessly over and over while in play/record. This will let you focus more on the melody and lyrics and not having to copy and paste stuff and make decisions about song length and things like that when you just wanna jam/record and see what comes out (Lot's of fantastic song ideas are born this way!). Arrangement and song length you can decide later at a time when you find it convenient.

Answer 3

I agree with this, and coming from SONAR, this is achieved using the "Matrix View" (which to the best of my knowledge is similar in functionality to Ableton Live). How this is implemented is via a 2D grid which allows for loops to be drag-dropped into cells. Each row represents a "track" and only one cell per track can be active at any time. Columns are used to synchronize loops in multiple tracks; allowing for them to be played similar to song sections (triggering a column activates all cells existing in that column).

In addition to this being highly useful for "noodling" within a song section (it can be set to loop forever as per the feature request), this can also be armed for recording into their associated tracks (so sections from this matrix can be triggered and recorded onto their associated tracks to quickly build up a song structure). Again, this is a "loop-based" engine which essentially runs in parallel to the "track based" engine in the track view.