Pulsar Operation Manual

## Advanced Controls 3 - Mute, Solo and Context-driven Playback

#### Mute and Solo

At any time you can either mute the current Track or solo it. The current Track refers to the one you are currently editing and is always shown in the bottom-left information display: `TRK: X:YY` where `'X'` is the Track and `'YY'` is the row of the Track your cursor was last on.

You can mute/solo a track from ANY editor page.

Function | Buttons
To mute/unmute the current Track from within any editor page | hold B then tap SELECT
To solo/unsolo the current Track from within any editor page | hold B then tap START

##### Mute

When a Track is muted you will hear no audio output from it. You'll see that the VU meter associated with the Track will stop responding and the status light underneath will be grey instead of green.

##### Solo

When a Track is soloed, audio output will only be heard from that Track. You'll see that all the other VU meters are no longer responding, their corresponding status lights will be grey and the current track's status light will be blinking red.

#### Context Playback

As well as using the method described in Basic Controls (SELECT + START) to play your Song from the first step, there are several other ways you can play your music.

These context-driven playback modes are all controlled with the START button.

Location | Action
Song Editor | pressing START causes Song playback to start from cursor position and each Track will loop back to where you started it when an empty cell '--' is reached.
Chain Editor | pressing START plays only the current Chain on the current Track, which loops when an empty cell, '--' is reached
Pattern Editor | pressing START loops only the current Pattern on the current Track
All Other Editors | pressing START loops only the Pattern on the current Track that was last accessed by the Pattern Editor

Note: Because the playback engine gets the Transpose setting from the current Chain, if you use the context-driven playback to playback a single Pattern, the transpose value will likely be wrong and you might not hear the pitches you were expecting. Mostly you can force Pulsar to use the 'correct' Transpose value by momentarily playing the Chain that contains that Pattern.

##### Song-in-a-Song!

When starting playback from the Song editor, because playback starts from (and loops back to) the step your cursor is on as opposed to the very first Song step, this means that you can actually define loops within your Song, Song-In-A-Song!

For example, consider this hypothetical (truncated) Song layout:

00 01 02 03 04 05
01 01 02 03 04 05
02 -- -- -- -- --
03 01 02 03 04 05
04 01 02 03 04 05
05 01 02 03 04 05
06 -- -- -- -- --

If you start the Song with the cursor on step `00` (the step number is the left-hand column), playback will start and loop between step `00` and `01`.

But if you start the Song with the cursor on step `03`, playback will start and loop through steps `03`, `04` and `05`.