I have found that you can create some incredible trance type techno 
with M. (yeah, this may seem a waste of M's possibilties..depending 
on your outlook...but it also proves that it is not simply something 
to be stuck in the experimental basket and forgotten about. Ie: it 
can certainly be applied to creating mainstream musical patterns...)

It is quite possible to create a simple techno bass drum pattern by 
only inputting a single note, that loops over and over and over... as 
long as you set the correct pattern tempo for it. 
Eg: try this for "basic"--
Get M playing so we can hear patterns as we create them. 
We will make pattern 4 our drum pattern. (Be sure to set the correct 
midi channel in Orchest) We will use 2 notes in this case. Highlight 
pattern 4's pattern type indicator (it is on a "pitch ditribution" 
default at startup with a tempo of 1/4. This is fine for our 
purposes.) Go to "patterns" on the menu bar and click edit. You will 
get the note input keyboard. Enter a bass drum note (eg: B0 if you 
follow the cubase drum mapping...) You will hear a rapid thump thump 
thump as your single note drum pattern cycles over and over... Now 
offset the bassdrum note either by clicking in a "rest" or by adding 
a cymbal hit using the relevant note. This will bring the apparent 
tempo down to something more manageable. There you have your two note 
drum pattern! (Boring?! This is a tutorial remember! Besides you'd be 
surprised what can be done with a 2 note pattern in M once you start 
playing with accents, durations, transposition, etc, etc...)
Now... Let's create a simple 16 note bass line pattern in pattern 1. 
(Remember to Set it to an appropriate midi channel in Orchest..) For 
this pattern we will set its tempo to 1/8. (We can see that our 2 
note 1/4 tempo drum pattern will be mathematically related to our 16 
note 1/8 tempo bassline.) Highlight pattern one, go to patterns on 
the menu, select edit pattern and then enter 16 bassnotes on the 
keyboard display. You can add as many rests/to notes as you want, but 
remember to keep an eye on the pattern length counter on the keyboard 
display so that it stays mathematically related! 
There you have it: acid M! Add patterns 2 and 3 yourself: try other 
related lenghts (4, 8, 16, 32) and tempos (1/4, 1/8, 1/16). When you 
start adjusting M's other parameters (accents, durations, etc.), 
you'll soon find that from this basic material you'll have countless 
other new patterns in no time. All of wich can be saved as snapshots 
to build your progressions...

Hope this is of some help to someone. 
Thanks for your tutorial Tim, it helped with a few of the features I 
hadn't yet started working with (snapshots, file saving and movies 
particularly). 

Adam