Maybe it’s just me, but does the Chord Machine sound dull to anyone else? Even with the FLE and actual filter turned all the way up, it sounds like it has a constant LPF on it. I feel like I’m missing something, but no matter what I do, I can’t get anything that sounds bright out of it.
same
If you use it for noisy textures, turning up Balance helps …
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I don’t use it a lot, but when I do, it’s usually for pretty dark/dull sounds. There’s a couple of half decent sawtooth waves in there that sound a bit brighter
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We need a proper digital fuzz/distortion added to syntakt to bring some life into chord machine, best I can do is delay and go crazy with the lfo to bring it to life so far
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It was my go to for Bass sounds… set the unison to x4 and play around with the other settings…
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It def has it’s uses, but given that none of the tracks are polyphonic, you’d think the chord machine would be more versatile. Even the nice saw waves still sound so dull and lifeless.
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MC chord uses a basic form of additive synthesis iirc from the manual so I assume syntakt does the same. It only has so many oscillators per voice so that’s why it never gets that bright.
It’s wavetables, so we’d just need brighter wavetables. Perhaps there can be an alternative set in the future, accessible via Setup (where you can change the Octave as well).
… or FUZZ DISTORTION 3:-)
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You come far with two SY BITS, one with detune to 0 or 12, one with 7. There’s proper saw and more. At least for traditional western-european chords 
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I always find wavetable synths a bit dull, most waves sound a bit organ like. More brighter and buzzier wavetables would be nice.
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Sounds dull but also feels a bit gimmicky to me. Would be a lot better to be able to input chords as notes IMO. Not sure it would be harder for the synth engine to support it (if that’s even a difficulty - you can read the low note as the tonic and map the other ones as quart and octave or stuff like that). Did not understand the interest of it when I played with a Syntakt.
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I’ve had the opposite experience it. I’ve been able to make great use of the Syntakt chord machine. It might be because I’ve had a lot of experience using it from the Model:Cycles. The Syntakt offers more sound shaping possibilities so I’ve really been enjoying it and it sounds great to me. I’ve always thought it was a cool machine 
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It lets you play 4-note chords on an otherwise monophonic channel.
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I like the chord machine when it works for a track. I think like all the machines they have their sonic quirks and limitations for use.
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Ya. I’ve been toying with that and pitch slides using LFOs. Pretty awesome. Still, seems silly that the one machine that would give us “poly” would sound so weak.
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I’d love to have brighter wavetables for noisy industrial sequences 
That was actually what I was hoping I could do with it, but ran into the very same problem.
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There are a few bright-ish (brighter?) saw waves around 82-84 and I think 102 on the waveform parameter. Beyond that, using the second filter as a bandpass and cranking the overdrive does help some, as does dedicating the analog fx block filter to it with some high freq bump.
But yea when I want a nice bright stab, it’s not the chord machine that I use
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In a tedious way. I know that it lets play up to 4 notes, but in terms of ergonomy I feel like they should have shot for regular chords (that is, you enter up to 4 notes yourself, while being eventually restricted to an octave to fit the limitations of the engine).
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I think that’s a cool idea. Suggest it as a feature request.
I checked the ST manual. It looks like even the MIDI tracks work in the “monophonic” way… like the OT. You enter a trig, a trig causes the MIDI Machine to output a root note and up to 3 other notes relative to the root. Changing the notes is done by changing machine properties, not by setting notes on the sequencer like you might in a more traditional polyphonic sequencer. I can imagine the Chord machine would be more comfy to use if its UI were more like the MIDI Machine, but I can also imagine it’d be a very complicated code change and also that they’d probably have to invent a new UI for it, and maybe even break their current UI guidelines/design system/architecture. Given most of it is “just code”, it’s probably changeable, but the downsides in consistency and maintainability might make a very convincing story for not doing it.
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