2014-09-13 by smw-mail@...
Beats, arps, riffs, triggers, etc. provide great flexibility. I would like to spend some time re-teaching myself some of this stuff. A few basic points related to this specific post (and some explorations).
But first--I believe the RTZ (Return To Zero) on-the-fly shortcut is: (1) hold down play, (2) press stop--aka the stutter effect. Normally, pressing stop by itself twice does a sequence/pattern RTZ, but if play is being held first, a single stop does a momentary RTZ of the sequence/pattern. I never tried it with beats/arps, but I am guess it might do the same.
Your E-Mu box (CS/P2500) has a number of ways of creating sequences or notes patterns, riffs, arps, lfos, etc.) There are also triggers.
The Audition button simply plays the AUDITION RIFF of the Basic Preset--the preset that's on the channel in the display window. You can go into Edit Preset mode and change the audition riff and if you want save it with the preset. If you want, you can also set the box to output the midi data--either to external gear, or with a midi loop (midi out to midi in) to record the riff into a pattern for your own use.
Audition Riffs are Sound ROM resources. You cannot change them. There are special Riffs known as Beats (BTS) riffs that have sequences on up to 16 channels. (I think some other special riffs are up to 4 channels--not sure, though. Most riffs contain note and possibly controller and other data on a single channel.)
OK--that's that about the audition button. I find it useful to hear what presets sounds like. Once you get over trying to jam with them (which can be cool!), you can get into other stuff--like arps, beats, triggers, etc.
Just briefly for now: the 16 buttons: You can toggle these on the fly between track mute/enable buttons and triggers buttons. If you go into CONTROLLERS, you have 3 choices for the trigger buttons: (a) Play Beats Parts, (b) Play Note Events, (c) Select Patterns.
If you choose Play Note Events, you have several parameters for each of the 16 buttons (T1->T16): Note, Velocity, Latch on/off, Channel, and destination (internal, external, both, and sequencer).
I have used this mode to trigger arps on my P2500 as background for live noodling on an external keyboard--some arps in latch mode for ongoing rhythmic stuff, some notes as momentary on triggers --such as for a note with a long decay.
If you choose Play Beats Parts, you can go into the ARP menu system to set up BEATS parameters: (a) Beats Mode, (b) Beats Keys Layout, etc. (Take a look, read the manual, play around, etc.)
In short, with Beats Mode you are using a single pattern from your ROM Resources--specifically, the audition riff of the preset on the channel selected in the BEATS MODE menu page. (Hope I got that right.)
Once you have selected a preset with a BTS Riff, you can play with it in a number of ways. With the audition button you are really just turning it on or off all at once, although with the 16 trigger buttons you can turn the different parts [channels] on and off individually. Also, some of your knobs are probably routed to such functions as BtsBusy and BtsVari via the PRESET PATCHCORDS. (Try a bts factory preset and look for preset patchcords for MidiM and MidiN.)
So, right out of the box, you can do quite a bit of jamming by controlling bts presets using the audtion button, the beats trigger part mutes, and the default knobs assigned to two of the beats patchcords.
From there it starts to get more complex. With either your box or an external controller, you can have your own beats keys layout setting to control 16 parts, 4 groups, etc. They can latched, unlatched, or 1-bar triggers. (And if you screw it up--you can always reload the factory beats configuration!!!!!) You can decide which parts belong to which of the 4 groups--or none at all.
I am pretty sure you can have your 16 trigger buttons set up to play arps and at the same time have an external controller turning beats parts on and off.
I am sure I am leaving out lots, but I hope this (1) explains the issue you are having with the audition button and (2) shows you a little bit of how you can use audition riffs with the 16 buttons, a couple of knobs, and some keyboard control.
Steve
PS: One of the CS addenda (131, or the manual itself--see XL-7 rev. D pp 242 ff. ) will give you a more detail and maybe even explain it better.
Oh--I have never used them, but you can use preset patchcords to control the beats velocity of each group, and there's an BtsXps patchcord destination for each group. Hmmmmm. That seems to mean you can use a knob to transpose the keyboard mapping for each group. So when there is a pitched instrument in the range of the preset, you can change the pitch.
Anyhow, hope this helps.