Anyone using modifiers?

Modifiers, On-Topic: Still haven’t used them. Well, I did a roll once.
Touch Bar, Off-Topic: Had to use a MacBook Pro recently with applications like DaVinci Resolve, i found it to be amazing.

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Yeah, I used them to test them out and really haven’t revisited them :shushing_face:

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When I heard the track count I immediately thought they would be dedicated midi tracks. Then when I saw the photo of the box I thought they would be scenes. At no point did I think they would be what they are today, frankly, a useless waste of space and UI. Please make them scenes instead! That would be much more useful.

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Nope!

Had my Syntakt since May, and only ever touch the modifiers sometimes to audition a sound while tweaking it.

Really hoping for an update that makes them useful for live effects like beat repeat and scenes.

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As is, I wouldn’t call them Modifiers, but modified triggers which cut the existing trigs. At least, they should be quantized.

Still have hope to use these Modifiers in order to modify tracks / trigs parameters, eventually controlling existing Modulations (btw there is no Control All on them without external midi trickery).

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Out of curiosity, I read through this entire thread. It looks like there’s at least one person here who has actually used them in a live performance. But everyone seems to agree they’re currently underwhelming.

This is the logical conclusion, yeah. Given Elektron’s track record of adding incremental value and features over time, it’s only a matter of… time. :blush:

What’s a bit surprising though is that it’s almost been a year since the launch and they still haven’t made it more useful. It seems like the least developed feature of the Syntakt so I speculate that this is the next major update from Elektron.

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Time will tell. :content:

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I once put trig mod A to “tune” and then adjusted the values to make each key a note value (like, Bb, C, D, Eb or something) in order to add ad lib notes to a bass line from the mutes page, but mostly just to see if it was possible. That was before song mode made it easier to stray from the mutes page…

I too wish they could figure out a way to do some kind of scene functionality with them. (Possibly by making them truly trigless, so that a sequence would play through a trig mod, and adding MW/PB/AT/BC macros as targets? I’ve also like the idea of holding a trig and adding p locks above…)

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Agree with several folks here. Scenes would be great. I checked out the modifiers on day one or two and haven’t thought about them since

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Like retrigs on the AR…Now I’m wondering if someone at Elektron maybe is allergic to quantization? Would make sense they limit their exposure. :thinking:

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I use modifiers to enter “four levels” of velocity for hihats sometimes when playing them in.

I too wish there was something implemented that was more usable in general.

We’ll see. Octatrack have a few quantized playback settings.

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They could be Midi tracks 1-4 as well. They are even labeled correctly: M1-M4 :slight_smile: I don’t find the modifiers useful at all for now.

On the other side, if the modifiers could be like scenes on Rytm or on the Octatrack with multiple parameters locked, this would be really useful musically!

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Christmas is next week, can we finally have a use for these! I have tried my hardest to make use of them, at least make them synced for fills and increasing scene style FX or midi channels which was a great idea! More performance scene type stuff is a must for live use.

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Yeah, this is by far the most mysterious feature of the Syntakt. Why did they even bother to add it? Perhaps it was one of those dilemmas of having 16 trigs and only 12 tracks and trying to come up with any use for it. But then why not go for something more obvious like 4 dedicated midi tracks instead? :thinking: That would have been easier to implement even.

Would be really interesting to get a sneak peek into their design process and supposed plans for this feature. It’s very clearly unfinished at the moment.

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So I have said it before, but I’m gonna say it again, because I want people to get behind this idea.

I think modifiers should act a little bit like a mix of scenes on the octatrack, and sound pool presets. So each modifier button could be held down and a knob could be twisted to set that value to that modifier, like scenes on the octatrack. This way you could save four different variations on a sound.

Then you could press the modifier trigs while the sequencer is in live record mode to record a performance of those trigs into the sequencer. This way you could get variation in the sound of a single channel without having to go in an p-lock everything after the fact.

Then the Key part of this idea is that when you then change the sounds on the modifiers, all of the trigs associated to that modifier change in turn.

With this functionality you could make 4 quick variations on a sound, record a performance of those variations, then change all four sounds in real time as the sequence plays. It would allow you to get a lot of the interesting variation that comes from P-locking, but in an instant and performative way.

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I used the retrig modifier for the bird sounds in this track of mine:

Indeed ! An option for that would be perfect…
I usually use track 7-8 for midi, but I don’t like to amputate audio tracks number !

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I’d like to see something like the performance effects macros you get on the Teenage Engineering Pocket Operators. These seem to offer midi and audio effects. Ideally you could apply temporary effects (like with the fill button) or have them latch in dedicated effects lanes. Similar to assigning sounds to a track, you’d assign an effect macro (filter sweeps, panning, ducking, rolls, midi dicing etc) to each modifier lane.

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Man, those effects are the best part about the POs.

I’ve recently been using my Syntakt to sequence an SP404mk2 that it’s running though.

So I can have a handful of midi tracks sequencing live master effects for the Syntakt like beat repeats, filters and bit crushing and I can’t help but think “Man, this would be insane if I could do this with the stock Syntakt” - it would really live up to that FX moniker.

Give us those, then let the modifiers be snapshots of a more fleshed out master FX toolkit.

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