Roland Forums

The BR900-CD has a limit of 50 steps in an arrangement and I can't figure out a way of going beyond this. There are, in fact, 5 arrangements possible per song but they only seem to work as alternative for each other and the 50 step limit remains in place. Is there a way of chaining up to 5 arrangements together to get up to 250 steps (like you could do with the good old Dr Rhythm DR-220?)Or should I thinking of another way of doing this. I can't imagine this machine is limited to 50 steps, which are normally over in less than 2 minutes!

Hmm... Thinking on my feet, one way to get round this may be as follows:

Make your first arrangement and bounce it to an audio track. In your second arrangement, make the first pattern 'break' and make it last for as long as the first arrangement. You then have 49 steps in which to program more patterns. These can then be bounced to the same audio track... use punch in and out if necessary, then start again with a 'break' pattern lasting the combined length of the first 2 arrangements then programs your next 49 steps etc etc etc

Hope this works for you.

Regards

Yes this would work ... in case you'd actually want to have an arrangement of > 50 "single measures"! Unfortunately I'd missed the essential point that a pattern can extend beyond one measure(up to 999 of 'em!). In fact most of the standard ones are 2 - 5 measures long already, and I now look at page 207 of the manual in a totally new light.

How could I get it so wrong? It's the way the rhythm box works. If you select a pattern of 4 measures as step 1 and then another pattern as step 2 already, then the remaining 3 measures from step 1 are ignored by the introduction of the pattern at step 2, thus confirming my assumption that each pattern was 1 measure long.

It's also worth mentioning that "break" you mentioned is pattern 327. Anyway, thanks a lot, John!