When you press “Save” button, you make a backup. It’s comfy, so you won’t lose your baseline pattern, especially when no backup pattern was made.
However, it’s easy to imagine, that you have no backup copy, and now you realize you want to have both your saved state and the changes you got, because it will be hard to reproduce them starting from scratch. Not possible at this point.
What do you want to achieve?
It would be nice to have an ability to save all the changed tracks to next variations’ slots. This way you won’t lose your baseline pattern and you’ll have all the lucky changes you made right in the same pattern. Also, nothing will hold you to build on top of that and so on.
Variations may be a lot more powerful in terms of composition and this feature could make your work really flow.
Interesting idea… would you imagine that the “save as variation” would automatically add a variation for all 8 tracks 9r just for the changed ones? what do you imagine should happen in case all variations slots are already filled? Just asking to understand better your idea…
I imagine, there’s no need to make variations for the tracks that haven’t been changed. It will be easier to read the variation grid too in this case. If user presses some shortcut to save a variation when all slots are busy (at least for one track), I guess it could notify user it’s not possible to save it, right on the screen or with some sort of pads-blinking. Maybe it would be even better to inform player about busy slots right after pressing the “save” button, so he could change his workflow accordingly.