GETTING PISSED!!!!!

[64Guitars]

Are your audio tracks playing back correctly? Or is it just the drum arrangement that's not playing as you intended? If the audio tracks are also missing measures, then the song's event table could be corrupted, possibly due to a defective memory card. But if the audio tracks play correctly and the problem is only with the arrangement, then the event table and memory card are not the cause. It would have to be either something you're doing wrong or a malfunction in your BR-600 affecting only the drum machine.

There's nothing in the system settings that would account for the problem you're experiencing.

Can you post the arrangement file (ARRANGE2.BR0) here?

[badrail]

I did not have much time at work to think about what may be wrong, but I'll try again. This worked last week, same song, same patterns and arrangement. I deleted the complete song, the only one that showed was the demo song. The following is how I am recording the song.
1. Start new song, give song a name.
2. Create SONG rhythm patterns, giving them each a name to correspond to a pattern #.
3. Create SONG rhythm arrangement, step 1 measure 1 pattern 1 (intro), step 2 measure 2-33 (various patterns), step 3 measure 34-(can't remember after this) When completed the instructions say to press EXIT a few times to get back to record screen and wait till the arrangement is SAVEd.
4. Use the rhythm arrangement playback to record (in order) Bass, Rhythm Acoustic guitar, Lead acoustic guitar in transitional areas, add voice. Bounce and Master.

After an earlier explanation from you on bouncing and mastering, the first completed song worked all the way through (thanks btw) I'll give it another go and see what I may be doing wrong. Do you have to press ENTER any where while creating a rhythm arrangement? It does not say so in the manual.

[64Guitars]

2. Create SONG rhythm patterns, giving them each a name to correspond to a pattern #.

I wonder if your custom patterns have something to do with it. As an experiment, try using only preset patterns in your arrangement. If that works, then substitute one of your custom patterns in one of the steps and see if it still works. If it works with preset patterns but then fails with your custom pattern, then you'll know that the problem is with your patterns rather than with the arrangement.

3. Create SONG rhythm arrangement, step 1 measure 1 pattern 1 (intro), step 2 measure 2-33 (various patterns)

Each step in an arrangement has only one pattern. So how can step 2 have "various patterns"?

[badrail]

So every time I change to a different rhythm pattern in a preceding measure I have to create a new step?    

[badrail]

In this song of 109 measures, I change rhythm patterns 45 times (some for only 1 measure) so each time I change a rhythm pattern for a new measure I have to create a new step?

[badrail]

Okay I just answered my own question, I changed steps every time I had a pattern change and it worked. Wow, 45 steps, let's renumber it and try it again.... I'll let you know if this works.

[badrail]

Okay, I have the arrangement done by the numbers (literally...) and it works, it plays back just how it's supposed to be to make the song work. I really was not trying to over-engineer the song, just to make some of the patterns flow with the meter of the song (composition stuff, I guess...) Thanks again!

[64Guitars]

So every time I change to a different rhythm pattern in a preceding measure I have to create a new step?

In this song of 109 measures, I change rhythm patterns 45 times (some for only 1 measure) so each time I change a rhythm pattern for a new measure I have to create a new step?

Yes, each step can have only one pattern, so every time you want to switch to a different pattern, you need to create a new step. If you want a lot of fills, you can soon run out of steps (the maximum number of steps you can have in an arrangement is 50). But you can solve that problem with custom patterns.

Each pattern can be from 1 measure to 999 measures long (provided the total number of measures in the arrangement is not greater than 999 for all steps). Let's say you create custom pattern S001 that's just 1 measure long. In the verse of the song, you want to repeat this pattern 4 times. However, on the fourth measure, you want to include a crash cymbal on the 4th beat of the measure. So you copy S001 to S002 and edit it to add the cymbal. The verse part of your arrangement might look like this:

Step	Pattern	Starting Measure	Length
3	S001	4	3
4	S002	7	1

The basic verse pattern (S001) plays for 3 measures starting at verse 4, then the modified version with the crash cymbal (S002) plays for 1 measure starting at verse 7.

This works just fine, but there's a way to do the same thing in just 1 step instead of 2. Edit S001 and change the pattern length to 4 measures. Then input the same notes from measure 1 into the other 3 measures so you have 4 identical measures in the pattern. Now edit the last measure to add the crash cymbal. The verse part of your arrangement now becomes:

Step	Pattern	Starting Measure	Length
3	S001	4	4

Note that "length" isn't the number of times to repeat the pattern. It's the number of measures that you want the pattern to play for. The number of repeats depends on the length of the pattern. Since this new pattern is 4 measures long and we tell the arrangement to play it for 4 measures, there are no repeats. It just plays once.

If your song has 3 verses with a chorus or fill in between, you'd have needed a total of 6 steps if a separate pattern was used for the crash cymbal. But by combining everything into a single pattern that's 4 measures long, you only need 3 steps for all of the verses.

In fact, you could take this to the extreme and just create one custom pattern that's the length of your entire song. Then your arrangement would only need two steps -- one for the custom pattern and one for preset P327:BREAK to end the song at the desired measure. Unfortunately, creating such a long custom pattern is tedious work since there's no way to copy measures within a pattern. Every note must be entered separately for the entire pattern. By using shorter patterns and repeating them in the arrangement, you don't have to spend so much time creating the patterns, making the job less tedious. The trick is to find the right balance between pattern length and arrangement complexity.

[Burtog]

Unfortunately, creating such a long custom pattern is tedious work since there's no way to copy measures within a pattern. Every note must be entered separately for the entire pattern. By using shorter patterns and repeating them in the arrangement, you don't have to spend so much time creating the patterns, making the job less tedious. The trick is to find the right balance between pattern length and arrangement complexity.




I was starting to think the time required in arranging drum patterns was down to my incompetance, I recently spent 2 evenings arranging the drum track to my last post, it's a real drag that you can't copy measures, nice to see it wasn't me and just a slow process. I actually make all the drums tracks up on the rhthym editor.