Up until now I’ve been using the FX tracks as laid out in the manual—placing a trig on the first step with HOLD set to 127. Then to switch on the effect I start the transport.
But… today whilst browsing some of the stock Kit presets I noticed some were using FX without the need for trigs or playback.
For example the kit ‘Musicbox’ has on Track 1 an FM machine and on Track 2 a Reverb machine set to Neighbour. I can play Track 1 (and also Track 2?!) and hear the FM go through the Reverb.
I set my MNM like this all the time. IT’s a pain in the arse to try to adjust parameters on an FX machine, if you can’t trigger and hear the machine running into it at the same time!
This is how you set it up (very easy):
select the track that contains your FX machine
hit the ‘KIT SETUP’ button
select ‘TRIG’ icon
the top of the list is ‘TRIG POS’. This is where you tell the currently selected track to also trigger another track of your choice (use arrow keys to change which track is selected.
Now when you press a trig key on your FX track, it will trigger the sound being fed into it. Unfortunately you can’t daisy-chain several tracks like this. But you do always have the option to split the keyboard into multiple tracks.
Forgot to mention, try placing a pattern of trigs on your FX track, and play with the HOLD and DECAY settings for the FX. This can create some wicked effects!
Then try moving trigs around on the both the sound machine track, and on the fx track. As the trigs interplay, things sometimes get very interesting.