Various types of parts
There is no restriction on how you assign the RESET TO, LOOP START and LOOP END
steps in a part. In the following, I will borrow terminology used to describe the
structure of popular songs because it is familiar and easy to understand. Suppose
the material for a song was laid out over a track or tracks in the following manner:
Intro-Verse-Chorus-Bridge-Outro
Material that is laid out this way is not meant to be played from start to finish but to
be sliced up and reordered.
Intro-[Verse-Chorus]
The most common kind of part assigns a RESET TO step to the beginning of a pas-
sage and then LOOP START and END to loop some portion of the latter half of the
passage. For example, in a ...ABCBCBC... song arrangement where A is the intro, B
is a verse and C is the chorus then you could easily arrange a part to play an intro
seamlessly segue into the refrain (i.e. repeating verse-chorus: BCBC...). See Part 1 in
the figure.
Chorus-[Verse-Chorus]
Sometimes you want to trigger a chorus and then return to the refrain. In this case
you would put the RESET TO step inside the looped section as in Part 4 of the figure.
Outro (or One-Shot)
If you want a section to play once and then play nothing afterwards then just set the
RESET TO step to the beginning of the section and then loop a single rest step (i.e.
step with GATE=0 or DURATION=0). See Part 3 in the figure.
The builtin STOP part
Finally, there is builtin part (always assigned to Part 0) that plays absolutely nothing
on all tracks when it is active. You can use this part to end all playing material.
Naked Loops
This is an important special case which is often used for bridges. See Part 5 in the
figure. When a part does not have a RESET TO step assigned then this part begins
playing from where the previous part left off. This means that the rhythmic relation-
ship (e.g. sync) of such "resetless" parts with other tracks can change depending on
what part is playing when they are triggered. On the other hand, parts with reset
steps will always start from the same place.
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