Alesis SR 16. Starting a second song with user patterns???

[Dabster79]

So i am confused. i recorded my first song which took 24 user patterns to create. i am onto my second song now. i named my 2nd song in song mode, but i thought you would have an empty set of patterns for each song you create. am i doing something wrong? or does the unit only store 50 A patterns and 50 B patterns in its entire memory? read manual thru a second time and the answer is not there for me??? help.
thanks,
Robert

[James Perrett]

It is ages since I programmed an Alesis drum machine but as far as I can remember you have one set of patterns in the machine and you just choose from those patterns and put them in sequence to make up a song.

[Dabster79]

yes, but i am not clear regarding the units available memory regarding user patterns per song you create. i am making my own patterns for six songs. the way i see it i may only have 100 user patterns total to work with. otherwise if i go over then i will have to delete previous songs patterns. does this make sense. it could be something minor that i am not doing right.
thanks

[muzines]

Yes. On these early drum machines, it's not like now, memory was limited*.

The manual should say roughly how much memory there is, but you have up to 100 patterns, and how many you can use usually determines how busy those patterns are.

As you can see, there's probably enough memory for a small handful of songs, depending on the patterns. Then once you've finished working on those songs, you'd back up the data over MIDI, clear it out, and start working on your next songs.

* When the SR16 came out, home computers typically had 2 to 4 *megabytes* of memory, if that gives context of the time.

[James Perrett]

Yes, you have a total of 100 patterns to work with but, as I remember it, each pattern can be fairly long so it may be worth combining a few short patterns into one longer one if you want to reduce the number of patterns that you are using. I have a recollection of storing a whole song in a single pattern but it was getting on for 25 years ago since I last used an Alesis drum machine.

[Dabster79]

wow! makes sense now! thank you for your quick responses. im liking this forum.

robert

[James Perrett]

* When the SR16 came out, home computers typically had 2 to 4 *megabytes* of memory, if that gives context of the time.

Amazingly enough the SR16 still appears to be a current product on the Alesis web site although only available to order from most UK dealers. There can't be many music-tech products with such a long lifespan.

[muzines]

* When the SR16 came out, home computers typically had 2 to 4 *megabytes* of memory, if that gives context of the time.

Amazingly enough the SR16 still appears to be a current product on the Alesis web site although only available to order from most UK dealers.

Indeed - we had a thread about this a while back. I think the SR16 is possibly the modern, MIDI, music tech product that has been in production for the longest time... since 1991 iirc...

Being incredibly popular, I think it's more than recouped it's R&D costs...