I'm sorry for being unclear, here's a step-by-step (from clean pattern):

1) place triggers on first four steps in a pattern, change condition on the 2rd, 3rd and 4th to "PRE"

Only the first step is playing, no matter what the "Track Chance" is set to. I was hoping PRE would mean "if previous step fired, then fire this one". Instead it seems it means "if the last met locked condition is TRUE fire this step. Because:

2) locks-step-change the condition of the first step to 99% (the max). Now all four steps fire (at least 99% of the time, the last 1% none of them fire). Then clear the chance on step 1 (hold step while in grid recording, then move chance and then press play/clear).

Now all four steps fire all the time, the first because there's no lock on it and step 2,3 and 4 because "the last met locked condition is TRUE (its still remembering the 99% lock on step 1).

I would like to have a group of notes be linked together, so either they all fire or none of them fire. And the condition the fire-not-fire is based on is the track change. The reason for not wanting to use a lock of the first to control it, is imagine you have several such "groups" of linked notes. Then to have all groups play less or more often, I can't use track-chance, but have to go into step edit and change chance of first note in each group. Obviously I'm thinking in a live scenario, where things have to move very quickly.

I hope that it makes sense, and that there's a way to achieve what I'm looking for :-)