Roland Musical Instrument manual Idea Track, Deeper Drums

maxWerk - Copyright 2000-2007 Amanda Pehlke

Published by RedMoon Music - www.RedMoon-Music.com

2.9 The Idea Track

An alternative to keyboard step entry that you can use to help create Basic and Drum Loops or Melody Phrases is the live- recorded, no-frills Idea track. This is a non-editable midifile recorder and player of non-transposing sequences that can serve as a simple motif-entering guide. Once you have armed this track for recording, maxWerk will capture live MIDI input beginning at the designated bar number. Subsequent recordings clear and overwrite material already present. Your Idea plays back with adjustable tempo to the instrument selected in the Idea window, layered with any MIDI messages that this device/channel already receives. You can quickly switch off Idea playback or ready it for automatic triggering by means of checkboxes in the Note Editor and Melody Phrase windows, making it unnecessary to revisit the Idea window for this purpose.

Once you have captured an Idea of any length, you can set it to play starting at any bar number you wish. If you set maxWerk to loop a certain selection of bars that includes the set starting bar, you'll hear your Idea play repeatedly along with any stored loop or Melody information. You might even use a longer Idea track to add an unstructured part to your finished Werk. However, the Idea track is not recorded into your Werk midifile, nor is it saved as part of a Werk file. Instead, you can save any number of Ideas as midifiles, bearing in mind that in maxWerk you can play only one at a time.

Once you abandon an Idea recording by switching off playback and subsequently quit maxWerk, the material in it is lost unless you have saved it as a midifile. Ideas cannot have tempo, notes or any other elements changed after they are recorded, but you can of course import saved Idea midifiles to another application for further work.

2.10 Deeper Drums

The d1 and d2 drum buttons in the top right Main Screen panel open an editor dedicated to the two Drum Loops. Its layout bears some similarities to the Basic Loops' Note Editor, but an obvious

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