AK 8ve Change Settings between kit changes

Hello all, I’m new here and I’m gradually learning the Analog Keys! I have two (hopefully quick) questions:

  1. I’ve started creating and saving kits with custom sounds. As I’ll be playing the AK live, I need a different sound set per song (not patterns etc., just stacked or layered sounds), so I’ve been saving a different kit for each different tune. Is this the best way to be doing it?

  2. A problem I’ve run into, is that each kit loads with whatever octave setting the keyboard currently resides in, not the octave setting that the kit was saved with. Is there a way to make it load with the octave that the kit was saved in?!

Many thanks in advance for any help you can offer!

The Keys Octave setting is not part of the Kit, so the answer is no

The way you can mitigate this is to stay roughly centred where you want to be (octave wise) and then retune the oscillators per sound so they are in the right range without too much of a shift, this will work fine for some sounds, but you would need to compare (things like filter key track are affected)

I can see the logic in what you desire, I’m just not sure it’ll ever be incorporated into a kit, but no harm asking - it arguably makes more sense on the A4 where you are faced with one octave - but that is why it’s important to set the oscillators to the range you may want to play without shifting

sounds like it - but if you are not relying on patterns, then i’d still suggest you created placeholder patterns with perhaps one trigless trig per pattern - this pattern will then retain the link to the selected kit - that way you can easily change between patterns (far simpler than kits, at least on A4) and the correct kit will be loaded

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Thanks so much for your advice - I’ll try retuning the oscillators instead. Not as easy as I was hoping, but mostly workable.

Re. loading kits / loading patterns, I would definitely appreciate something quicker, so I’ll look at using empty(ish) patterns. Are there shortcuts for loading patterns?

yes - press the desired bank selector and then chose a pattern from the lit trigs

I think even just storing a benign parameter lock shouldn’t pose much of an issue - it’s just that the pattern needs to be non-empty to retain the kit relationship

if you created a Trigless lock on e.g. the CV or FX track (Fn+Trig) then the kit selected for that pattern will be stored

you can speed up the pattern select by choosing the direct change mode

here’s another idea to make use of the sequencer (if you like)

if you parameter lock different values to a few trigs, you can play those (sub-presets) by holding that trig down in step edit mode and play the keys - the key playing will adopt the parameter changes pre-locked into the sequencer

so there’s endless possibilities there (if you play one handed) or just need to switch to a different sound for a moment, even a radically different one

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