Custom rhythm tracks on Boss BR600

[WarpCanada]

Something very odd affects all the preset rhythms on my box. If I have a 32 bar loop and I want to record with drums, all the basic rhythms seem to end around bar 16, and have an ending.

I know how to turn the rhythm on and off with the Rhythm button, but I haven't plummed the "how to" steps for Rhythm Edit.

I go to Rhythm Edit and it says "Cannot edit this is a preset". (Well thanks.)

I have no idea how to get started making custom rhythms.    I want the ability to have a four bar intro, say, 12 to 16 bars of some consistent "verse 1 riff", some kind of chorus riff, say 8 bars, and then a verse two rhythm part.   How do I build this?

Should I do this from the PC App (which doesn't work on Windows 7), but I might be able to get working on an old Windows 7 machine.

Been poking through the manuals and maybe what I need is to learn the "arrange" button's stepwise editing thing.  I'm puzzling through the manual page 154 "Creating Original Arrangments"...  I have created some steps and set the starting measure for each pattern but it doesn't seem like I've got it working. It just repeats a simple one bar pattern even though I have other stuff set up to happen (pattern P### values).

[64Guitars]

Something very odd affects all the preset rhythms on my box. If I have a 32 bar loop and I want to record with drums, all the basic rhythms seem to end around bar 16, and have an ending.

I know how to turn the rhythm on and off with the Rhythm button, but I haven't plummed the "how to" steps for Rhythm Edit.

I go to Rhythm Edit and it says "Cannot edit this is a preset". (Well thanks.)

I have no idea how to get started making custom rhythms.    I want the ability to have a four bar intro, say, 12 to 16 bars of some consistent "verse 1 riff", some kind of chorus riff, say 8 bars, and then a verse two rhythm part.   How do I build this?

Should I do this from the PC App (which doesn't work on Windows 7), but I might be able to get working on an old Windows 7 machine.

Been poking through the manuals and maybe what I need is to learn the "arrange" button's stepwise editing thing.  I'm puzzling through the manual page 154 "Creating Original Arrangments"...  I have created some steps and set the starting measure for each pattern but it doesn't seem like I've got it working. It just repeats a simple one bar pattern even though I have other stuff set up to happen (pattern P### values).

The preset arrangements are only meant as a demo. That's why they end after 13 to 30 bars. You can copy a preset arrangement to a song arrangement and then edit the steps to make it the desired length. But it's usually easier to build your own arrangement from scratch.

See these tutorials that I created many years ago for the BR-864/900/600.

https://songcrafters.org/64guitars/BR/Tutorials/Rhythm_Guide_Intro.html

https://songcrafters.org/64guitars/BR/Tutorials/Arrangement_Example.html

Then if you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them here.

I think the thing that most people struggle with at first is specifying the length of a step. Unfortunately, there is no "length" parameter in the steps. Instead, the step will repeat continuously until the Starting Measure of the next step. So you indirectly specify the step length by specifying the starting measure of each step. For example, if step 1 starts at measure 1 and step 2 starts at measure 9, then step 1 has a length of 8 bars.

Also, there's no specific "End" step to stop the arrangement. The final step will keep repeating endlessly until you press Stop. The solution is to set the last step of every arrangement to pattern P327:BREAK which is completely silent. So even though the BR's drum machine will keep "playing" (advancing the counter) until you press Stop, there will be no sound after the final step begins.

[64Guitars]

Should I do this from the PC App (which doesn't work on Windows 7), but I might be able to get working on an old Windows 7 machine.

The BOSS BR Rhythm Editor software is useful and you might find it more user friendly than programming the BR's built-in drum machine directly. But it's good to be able to program the drum machine both ways; directly and via the BR Rhythm Editor.

The BR Rhythm Editor should work in Windows 7. If it doesn't, try setting the Windows compatibility mode to XP.

Here's a document about using the BR Rhythm Editor.

https://songcrafters.org/64guitars/BR/Docs/Manuals/BRWC/BR_Wave_Converter_Manual_Win_E.pdf

And this Boss Workshop booklet might help with programming the BR's drum machine.

https://static.roland.com/assets/media/pdf/BR600WS02.pdf

[64Guitars]

I want the ability to have a four bar intro, say, 12 to 16 bars of some consistent "verse 1 riff", some kind of chorus riff, say 8 bars, and then a verse two rhythm part.   How do I build this?

Step	Starting Measure	Pattern
1	1	P025:ROCK5­IN
2	5	P026:ROCK5­V1
3	21	P056:HdRc4­V1
4	29	P028:ROCK5­V2
5	45	P327:BREAK

In BR Rhythm Editor it looks like this:

[WarpCanada]

Awesome. Are you able to get the BR Rhythm Editor to run on Win10?

[64Guitars]

Awesome. Are you able to get the BR Rhythm Editor to run on Win10?

I've never used Windows 10. The last version of Windows that I used was XP. I've been using Linux ever since and love it. The BR Rhythm Editor runs just fine in Linux under Wine. So does all of the other BR software.

[WarpCanada]

Okay so I was able to make a custom rhythm pattern track inside one of my songs. I sort of hoped that the rhythm pattern would also be visible once I created a new Song.  Kind of like the presets P01 and such are, but it seems that the song rhythm patterns live forever inside one song and can't be easily moved into another new project.

It seems like once you create a new song from Utility > New, it seems that all the S presets are back to undefined. 

ie, if from Track32 I hit arrange it says

ARRANGE
AR> S01:EMPTY001  (S02:EMPTY002, S03:EMPTY003, etc)

But on the prior track, Track31, once open, there are a bunch of empties, but S02:ROCK6 exists.

It makes no sense to me that the presets are not editable so you copy into a Rhythm Pattern but then that pattern is not visible once you get out of your current song.

I do a lot of jams and would like to start a new project and quickly have a 32 bar song structure in one of my favorites available somehow to be put into the new project without painstakingly editing on device or needing my PC in the loop.

It seems a good tip when editing patterns is to copy a factory pattern, then go to the end of the pattern and alter the last step first, because the UI of the rhythm pattern editing on the boss br600 is such that if you have a pattern where Step 3 starts at bar 10, you can't alter Step 2 and move its start past bar 10 until you first go to step 3 and alter that. And you can't alter that until you alter step 4, and so on. So to alter a 20 step pattern would really require you think it all out backwards, and enter the values in step 20, then step 19, then step 18.

If there was even a way to save this empty track as STARTER01 and then copy that track, that might be the best way to work.

[64Guitars]

All presets in any BR are read-only. You can't overwrite them. Instead, you can save up to 5 arrangements in the song bank of each song.

If you want to be able to use the same drum arrangement in multiple songs, then I'd suggest creating a new song project called "Default" or "NewProj", for example. Create your drum arrangement in this song but leave all of the tracks empty. Then, whenever you want to create a new song, just copy your default project.

See Copying a Song (Song Copy) on page 86 of the BR-600 manual.

Your default project could actually contain up to 5 custom drum arrangements. When you copy the default project to a new project, you could then select whichever of the 5 arrangements best suits the song you want to record.

Personally, I've never had the need for a default drum arrangement since all of my songs are completely different and require their own custom drum arrangement anyway. So I just start from scratch on each song. It's easy enough to do once you get the hang of it. If I was doing a jam type song, I'd start with a simple 2-step arrangement consisting of just a 2-bar count-in and a single pattern set to the desired tempo. Since there's no step 3, the pattern in step 2 will repeat indefinitely. Then I'd start recording a rough guitar track to work out the structure of the song so I'll know where the chorus starts, for example. Once I have that information, I can refine the drum arrangement a bit by adding step 3 for the chorus and step 4 for verse 2, for example. Eventually, when I've determined where the song will end, I'll add the final step with pattern P327:BREAK to end the drum arrangement at the desired bar.

[64Guitars]

It seems a good tip when editing patterns is to copy a factory pattern, then go to the end of the pattern and alter the last step first, because the UI of the rhythm pattern editing on the boss br600 is such that if you have a pattern where Step 3 starts at bar 10, you can't alter Step 2 and move its start past bar 10 until you first go to step 3 and alter that. And you can't alter that until you alter step 4, and so on. So to alter a 20 step pattern would really require you think it all out backwards, and enter the values in step 20, then step 19, then step 18.

I've always said that the Starting Measure parameter should have been Length instead. Then you could change the length of any step without affecting the others. It's much easier to think of an arrangement in terms of "play this pattern for 8 bars then play this other pattern for 16 bars" rather than trying to work out what bar number a step should start at. Boss finally got it right with the BR-80 which has a Length parameter instead of Starting Measure. But all of the other BRs have only the Starting Measure parameter.

Even the BR Rhythm Editor software forces you to work with starting measures. But at least you can change the length of a step by dragging its right edge and all of the other steps will automatically shift accordingly.

If there was even a way to save this empty track as STARTER01 and then copy that track, that might be the best way to work.

The drum arrangements are stored in the file "ARRANGE2.BR0" within each song folder. So you can copy that file from one song folder to another using your computer's file manager. Just make sure you don't accidentally copy it to the wrong song folder because it will completely overwrite any existing drum arrangements in the destination song.