One of the latest "Behind The Synth" podcasts has Nate recalling early Motif use in band/stage settings where sequencers and sampling features were used to help "on the fly" fill out background parts. Glad to see some revisiting of items left on the table from previous generations.

Once I got into replicating the abilities of the 3.0 Pattern Recorder in Cubase 10 Pro, it turned out there seems to be a bug in Cubase that prevented me from getting it to work. Or, if it isn't a bug, there's something fundamental that I don't understand about using the Arranger Track. (But I think it's actually a bug.)

? what bug

I have used both... using Cubase I often just jam with 8 midi track and 1 vocal + synths on an audio track. The arranger in the DAW lets you pick out sections and then easily arrange a tune and arrangement from the best bits...., its pretty intuitive and easy. Once I discover the main parts in the DAW I then can turn to using the new pattern seq to lay out how I might want to tweak it ..., and jam along using the scenes. So the two for me absolutely can work together. Turns out I need to stop using the work computer for Cubase, so I am gonna get me new laptop just for Cubase and my Montage. In the meantime the Montage and Pattern, song, and audio recorder/seq will be just fine till the Holidays when I get Cubase 10 Pro back up and running on a new laptop.

? what bug

I was trying to set something pretty simple up using the Arranger Track. But it didn't work.

I wanted to have two Arranger Events, one right after the other. I wanted the first one to drop straight through to the second one, and I wanted the second one (1 bar long) to repeat endlessly. I couldn't get this to happen.

I have the first one set to RepeatMode=“Normal”. I have the second one set to RepeatMode="Repeat Forever". What happens when I try to play it is that the first Arranger Event repeats forever.

What I want is to start in the second Arranger Event and repeat there until I want the 9-bar break to happen (that's the first event), after which I want to fall off the end of that and back into the 1-bar repeat forever second event.

I have the following Key Commands set up: 1 to trigger the first Arranger Event, 2 to trigger the second. My idea was that I would hit the 1 key whenever I wanted to break to happen, and I would automatically get back to the repeating 1-bar event when the break was finished.

I have the 1 key set to “Trigger Arranger Event 1“, and the 2 key set to “Trigger Arranger Event 2“.

To play this, I start by hitting the 2 key. Then I hit the space bar, and A Minor starts to repeat. So far, so good.

When I want to play the Break, I hit the 1 key, and Break starts to play. I want the Break to play just once and then go back to repeating A Minor (to play off the end of Break into A Minor, so to speak), but what it does instead is to continually repeat Break, even though I have the mode of Break set to “Normal“.

I think that either there is a bug in the Arranger Track feature, or there is something fundamental about this feature that I don’t understand yet.

The images didn’t upload correctly. No idea why. Just uploaded them exactly the same way, and this time it worked. (Shrug...)

You may have uploaded at the same time the admins were cleaning spam and something got caught in the middle.

You may have uploaded at the same time the admins were cleaning spam and something got caught in the middle.

Or maybe the Gods didn’t like the first goat I sacrificed.

Here is a small Cubase project that demonstrates the problem.

From Steve on the Steinberg forum:

It looks like things are programmed to repeat endlessly if you use a Key Command to play the arranger part. Notice that the arrows in the Arranger Inspector Chain don't light up- Cubase isn't playing the chain, nor using the parameters assigned in it. It's just playing the triggered segment endlessly until you tell it to move on, and it moves on based on the Jump Mode.

It doesn't look like a bug, but I agree that it's not all that intuitive that it would work this way.

It would be nice if they mentioned this behavior in the manual. It wasted a lot of my time figuring this out.

It’s why they have support. Often with tools like this there is no one way to work. I’m just glad they could follow what it was you were attempting to do (I couldn’t and still don’t understand).

The Arranger Track as I understand it is designed to create a linear set of instructions that when “flattened” turns your looping segments into a finish Play Order... as soon as you enter terms like “endlessly” — I get confused (how does that compute in a device designed to create a play order? But glad you got it sorted.

I was trying to use Cubase to come up with the simplest possible way to play Take Five live. “Flattening“ was not part of what I was trying to do. I wanted to compare doing it that way to doing it with the new 3.0 pattern recorder.

My idea was to hit the 2 key to start the repeated A Minor playing. Then when I wanted to play the 9 bar break, I would hit the 1 key and the break would play and run right off the end of itself back into the repeated A Minor. If it worked that way, I would only ever have to hit a key when I wanted the break to happen.

It’s not so difficult to hit the 2 key sometime during the break to get back out of it after it plays once. I just wanted to understand why it wasn’t working the way I thought it did.