Hi Jacquline
Welcome to the forum
is it possible to play two patterns at the same time like in a regular daw or is g-stomper functioning in a whole different way?
One of the main differences between the Groovebox approach and an typical daw is that you don't arrange single tracks within a song. You're always arranging patterns, and the pattern contains the specific tracks. G-Stomper has a maximum of 24 concurrent tracks. So if you set your G-Stomper settings to 24 tracks, you have always 24 tracks in a pattern. With other words, no, you can't play 2 patterns at once, but you can play 24 tracks at once;).
Usually to start a song, you begin with a single pattern. Once you think the beat rocks, press 'select view' on the main screen and choose 'pattern set'. This will open up the pattern set view, in fact the pattern arranger (here you can have a max of 64 concurrent patterns loaded, 4 banks of 16). When the screen shows up, one of the pattern slots is red. This is the currently selected one. You can check this by pressing play to hear what this pattern sounds like.
Now long press that pattern slot to open the menu and choose 'copy pattern'. Then click on the destination slot, e.g. 2. Now you've created an identical copy of your pattern in slot 2. Now slot 2 should be red (selected). Now go back to the main screen and mute a few tracks of the pattern or make any changes you like, so that it sounds different than the original one. Then again to the pattern set. Click on 'PtrnSet Menu' and choose 'save pattern set' to save the complete set (including both patterns).
Once finished press play and switch between the two filled pattern slots (1 and 2). When you click on a pattern slot during playback, the new selected slot turns yellow, which means, it's a pending pattern change. In fact, the current pattern will play back until its end is reached, then it changes to the new selected one.
Play around a bit with that and you'll see..
There are also extended pattern change methods, but for now I would choose the single click (the standard one).
This is what the live pattern arranger is about.
Now, to automate that pattern changes, enable the song mode and press play +record. Then switch between the pattern slots during the playback/recording. Press stop again and while letting the song mode enabled press play. Et voila, you've recorded a pattern sequence, or in other words, a short song.
You can also create the song manually instead of live recording it, or you can edit a song manually after live recording it. For that just enable the song ed (in addition to the song mode). In that mode you can change the pattern slot for each song step, add/insert or remove steps.
Hope this help to begin with songs.
If you have further questions, just feel free to ask