How to know what is active

[mvdirty]

Setup patterns here, too, usually in a (single-row) island at the top of the song.

Though I do occasionally get tripped up by FX “carrying over,” most of the time it is a net positive rather than a negative.

[Paranormal Patroler]

Mostly no note patterns with initialization/setup stuff. However I kind of always also have notes to tune my VCOs somewhere as well.

The length depends on several things:
- how many/much FX I wish to set and the type of track. E.g. a CV16 track has 3 FX per row. To set up 10 FX I need at least 4 rows.
- some FX depend on other and it may be easier to to put stuff on several rows.
- there are probably more things that I don't recall right now

Most of the time I don't care about the length (using the default 64 steps or whatever is the default in the project). The initialization is not part of the "song" as such, just like tuning of VCOs, patching cables, adjusting ADSRs pods etc. When they contain notes for tuning I can just play that row/island and have my output turned down and fine. If I had a fully automated mixer I could even control that from the setup patterns

Especially the clean-up patterns, don't they eat up timing from a playing sequence though?

[mgd]

Especially the clean-up patterns, don't they eat up timing from a playing sequence though?

Well, that depends on how you use them.

In my opinion most of the time they are not required. Or let's look at it the other way:
When or why would you need a cleanup pattern.

My answer to that is:
Whenever you play a project after a project that makes (heavy) use of automators etc. you will want the new project to start with a clean slate. You can achieve a clean slate in two ways:

1. always setup each and every function in a setup pattern island
   
2. at the end of a project/song that makes use of (some) automators etc. stop/end/reset exactly those
   

1. obviously is not a very support friendly solution
2. is what I would propose. Practically you could do that by at the very end of your song/project starting the cleanup island (which obviously does not need to create any sound). It's also usually very fast, i.e. it should not require more than a second or two to do all the cleanup. And then you can load the next project.

Or did I misunderstand your question?

Kind regards,
Michael

[Paranormal Patroler]

No, your answer cleared it up very succinctly, so thanks for that. I enjoy hearing about how other people work and with modules like NerdSeq insight such as the one you shared always brings up some nice ideas!