Matrixctrl -> Coll -> Matrixctrl

Ah, gotcha. Then be sure to check out several other goodies: mtr records matrixctrl, with just one track (as I recall) so you can play back the generation / manipulation of your patterns. With just one track of the mtr, too, you can play it back at any speed by using "next" and a delay factor instead of just "play", with a small bit of fiddling. Very cool stuff, and of course the speed is adjustable in real-time.

Also zl rot is great for rows and columns, to provide equal-but-rotated versions of your patterns. For beats this will do offsets / syncopations, and for pitches it would do transposition (kind of). Interesting stuff can be derived this way, and of course you can "mtr" the zl rot rotation amount, or randomize it, or cycle it, etc.

I've also found a system of filling the rows (or columns if you like) with equal-spaced beats automatically to be very helpful, for testing as well as for performance. Simplest way I found is to use uzi # (total # of beats across if filling rows) --> % 4 (mod # = how often you want a beat filled, in this case every 4) --> sel 0 (means the mod is 0) --> fill beat. So you can easily (say) fill a row every 4 beats, or just as easily, switch the beat on or off, or fill all the OTHER beats. etc.... etc... Have a drop-down for the mod # for each row, preset the dropdowns, and you can have all kinds of patterns generated with one click. And you can mtr the preset #.... ok, you get the idea ;)

Another thing: try *scripting* the matrixctrl: send messages to thispatcher to increase the size (height and width). The matrixctrl is quite special in that instead of scaling its size, it adds rows and columns based on its size! So... your user could have a 16 X 8 grid, or a 32 X 2, or a 4 X 16, etc... I suppose if the monome is a static size, then this might not be as useful, but being able to make subsets of the overall grid could be interesting. Of course, screen space can be an issue here.

Finally don't forget that you can do lots of this stuff with jitter matrices too, and especially if you're going to want cc data, there's a heck of a lot you can do with generating new patterns and values through jit.op, jit.brcosa, jit.bfg, etc... so you could use generated or pre-recorded video material to make your data (it would be output as a single luminosity 0-255 value per cell, scaled to 0-127 for cc), at the right resolution (grid-size) for the monome or whatever you want. Endless possibilities... now your music is directly related to the video you're using, and the effects you apply to it!

Have fun... CJ