Sonicbytes ERA, any experts out there? Help!

[Magpel]

Hi folks, desperation heave here...

I bought Sonicbytes' ERA MIDI step sequencer years ago, long before the products were absorbed by Sugar-bytes and discontinued.

Dusting it off recently for a project and it is a total hoot. The manual, however, is a noble attempt but often comes up a little short.

This is a question for anyone who is fluent in ERA and its terminology and operations, because the behavior of mine has suddenly changed (since a few days ago) and I can't figure out what I have done to make it change or how to change it back.

Right now, any step-note changes I make in a pattern variation also change the main default pattern. So in other words no variations are possible on the step level.

i.e., I create a drum Pattern (A 1.1) I want to make a variant groove (say subtract one hi hat hit) in variation A.1.2, but when I delete the hi hat from the step in A.1.2, it deletes it from A.1.1 as well -- the Pattern Variations all seemed linked and locked. They weren't before.

The manual's section Variations offered no help.

Boy would it be awesome if I were missing something simple and someone here set me straight!

[bitcrush01]

I think you can only turn steps on or off in the "STEPS" row to make variations and not delete single notes (hi hat for example) without changing the pattern.

[ENV1]

Are we talking about ERA or ERA2?

As for ERA2, heres the most important points in a nutshell:

- A pattern is what it is, i.e. its variations can not have different notes. What you can do in a variation is mute notes and/or rearrange the order in which the notes are being played (and how fast), but if you actually want to trigger something with more/fewer/different notes you will have to set up and trigger one of the other patterns because you cannot do that with a variation of the same one.

- Triggering a variation of a pattern will not stop the variation that it was triggered from. (I.e. triggering VarY from VarX will not stop VarX, which means if you mute a note in VarY then that note will still be played by VarX.) The variation(s) will rather run in addition to the variation(s) responsible for the triggering, i.e. they will all be going at the same time. Example: If pattern A1-Var1 has a break set at Step8 to trigger A1-Var2, then A1-1 will not stop playing when the sequence reaches Step8. Instead A1-2 will kick in and play alongside A1-1, which allows you to do things like 'chordifying' otherwise monophonic sequences by altering the note-order of Var2. (Otherwise the notes of both Vars would be the same on all steps, i.e. useless unless you change one of the Vars step-speed or whatever.) See an example pattern in the attachment.


Thats pretty much it as far as ERA2 is concerned, any other questions feel free to ask.

(My favorite step-sequencer plugin, i know it pretty well.)


PS: Put the example pattern on something plucky, polyphonic, with medium release. Var1 is the 'main-seq', Var2 is the 'chorderizer', Var3 adds kind of a 'strummy' effect. Very very basic of course, but looking at how this was set up should give you at least a rough idea what the variations are for in ERA2.

[Magpel]

Thank you for the excellent reply!