From chandler@nethost.multnomah.lib.or.us Mon Jan 23 10:23:23 1995 Date: Sun, 22 Jan 1995 21:24:18 -0800 (PST) From: David Chandler To: Legion Cc: Analogue Listserv Subject: Re: 606 programming... I typed up a long answer to Legion's question, so I thought I'd post it publicly since I never see anybody post this. People are probably doing that petty DJ-thing of 'covetting' the programming secrets. Psh! Seems like I typed this up last year... Anyone want to correct my instructions, please? On Sun, 22 Jan 1995, Legion wrote: > > Hi, > > I was writing to someone named Mr. 808 on the analogue heave list and he > passed on your name as someone who might be able to help me. I recently > got a 606 and have figured out the basics of how to program in patterns > but can't seem to figure out the steps to program a track and/or erase > one. Yeah, I was just at his house looking at a 909 for the first time... Nice hardware, good knobs and quality buttons... > Do you have a 606 manual that you could copy and/or trade? I have a > number of manuals as well as some patch sheets I could send you in > return. I figured it out from scratch. I don't have my 606 in front of me, but here's the thing from memory... You put the right knob in Track Play and turn the left knob to the Track (Song) you want to edit (1-8). Then you turn the right knob to Track Write (pretty obvious so far here...) At this point, as just about anywhere in the Track Write mode, you can hold the shift button (I can't remember what it is labelled as on the 606, but it is just left of the "1" pattern number button, might be called "mode" or something, but from here on out I'll refer to it as the "shift button") anyway , you hold the shift button, and the led's display which measure you are on. If you just turned it on, it should be "1" blinking. The way you 'calculate' the measure number is with the "100", "200", "10"/"0", and 1 - 9 LED's. Like, hold the shift button and press "100", then "1" then "8". The 200 light should stay on, the 1 light should stay on and the 8 light should blink. This adds up to measure 218. If you hit TAP, it will advance and you can get the idea pretty quickly as you see it advance through 9, 10, 11 and 99, 100, 101. Yuck, very octal/binary programming sort of feel, but that's what you get when your output is a row of lights! The 909 has a cool dim/blinking mode that makes smart use of the lights as well... You can press start/stop and the pattern at the present measure that you are supposedly editting will play and the light for that pattern will go on. If you press Tap, it will advance to the next measure (push the shift to see that the measure number is advanced) If your Tap button is sensitive (like a on my friends 303 for instance, which incidently makes programming difficult!) it might skip to a second or third measure beyond the one you were at. Really, the thing to understand here is that you have set (or was already set by previous owner) a max for that particular track, like they defined 193 patterns already, and you want to strip it down... what do you do? Well, I'm rusty here, but I think you press the "DEL" button and it sort of eats up the track you were on and shifts all future measures back one so that you are looking at the pattern the the next measure used to have. Think of it like the DEL key in a word processor: if you want the sentence to be short, and it was already long, you might have to press it 200 times! I've done this, and it eats up all the measures that were either "INS" (inserted) or just "TAP"'d to (you can define a measure to play a certain pattern, hit "TAP to move to the next measure # and so on and it will immediately tack a new measure to your track (by the way, the default seems to be pattern 16 of whatever group (I-II) you are in). If you go to Measure 1 and hit DEL two million times, you will surely make that track a nice short 1 pattern length (that is, your 'song' is one pattern long and it repeats your song over and over) Actually, do this, hit start, listen and see the pattern that is repeating, and hit TAP and choose another pattern, then hit TAP and choose another pattern, then hit TAP and choose yet another. This should make your song four measures long and repeat over and over. But you won't hear anything while in TRACK WRITE mode except the repeating pattern that is used for the measure you're editting: you have to hit stop, turn the knob to track Play and hit start again. It will start the "song" at the measure you were at when editting and will loop through the four measures of your song. If this works, you can see that just turning the knob from TRACK WRITE to TRACK PLAY saves the song, just as going from Pattern Write to Pattern Play saves the pattern! The trick is to hit that shift button a lot to keep aware of which measure # you're choosing a pattern for when you are fumbling around in TRACK WRITE mode. I like making the 606 do triplets fast (hitting shift button while the lever is on the b b b / b b b / b b b / b b b / ....etc setting...you'll have to move the lever, hit shift, listen to the relationship of the tempo to the midi clock/other synths, and repeat to find it...) I generally make my songs a similar length, so that I can switch between them while I am playing and the breakdowns appear in the same place. Cool thing about the 606 programming is that if you are on say measure 6 of your song and you want to jump ahead, just hold down the shift button and 'type' in the number of the measure you want. Also, I stumbled apon a fill-in programming range function once. I inserted a "fill" or whatever it is labelled as, and it played measures 270-274 and then returned to the measure one-after the one that played before it left to 270. This is a logical expansion of the 808's fill function, but I bet that you can make the fill (more of a "chorus" part if you think about it :-) ) cover, like, 8 or 16 patterns, but I haven't taken the time to figure it out. I just once had a song that went: Measures in order: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,270,271,272,273,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,270,271,272,273, etc I can't remember if it occupied one measure to refer to the "chorus/fill" or whether it just slipped in there, and I can't remember at all defining the length of the "fill"... I wish I had a manual, but I am kind of having more fun without one... Playing w/mr808's 808 I realized that the TR-808 doesn't let you go from pattern write to pattern play and change patterns while it is playing!!! Major design bummer to me, considering my 606 editting is 99% listen-while-editting-approach. Whew! > > If you don't have a manual would yo be able to list for me the basic > steps in writing a track? I know I'm not far but there's a step or two > that I'm not doing and nothing seems to be saving. > > > thanks for your help, > > > David >