Turning Reaper into a Pattern-Based Sequencer

The other week there was a thread about pattern based DAW's vs Reaper and how much more convenient writing is in a pattern based environment. I migrated from FL recently and miss that quick and easily iterated writing workflow so I decided to try to make it work in Reaper. It's taken a few weeks of fiddling to get it to work properly, here are the results so far:

I use empty MIDI items as the Pattern Clips. For name visibility I like to put one of X-Raym's text items underneath the empty MIDI item.



Since the items need to be in a group under the pattern clip, I use a custom action "Group Pattern Clip" to make this faster.

Here I'm grouping and copying two drum patterns out to make an arrangement:



That "Group Pattern Clip" custom action is as follows:



The real star of the show, custom action "Propagate Pattern Clip", uses the markers as navigation points so you have to save your marker set before using and restore it afterwards.

In this gif you can see I've made some changes to my two patterns and am propagating these changes to all subsequent patterns that share the same name.



And here's the custom action for that:



Now you can see why the gif shows such a low FPS...

Turning Reaper into a Pattern-Based Sequencer