i want to use the a4 to make kick sounds. i can get some good sounds, but when i change the spacing between them i get some really awful-sounding problems.
i generally construct kick sounds this way:
shortest note length
triangle wave
osc retrig on
filter1 open
high resonance on filter2 (usually a LP or BP, but the problem is way more obvious with HP)
kicks 1, 3, and 4 are evenly spaced with the kicks before them, but as you can see, kick 2 has more space in front of it, and its waveform looks pretty different. when there’s more space in between kicks, it sounds like the resonance isn’t in effect, and i lose all of the bottom end to the sound - just a hard whack sound.
i’m 100% sure performance/aftertouch/velocity/LFO/env are not affecting anything.
i’ve reached out to elektron about this but their customer service has been very slow to respond. i’m losing my mind. can anyone else reproduce this?
Have you tried duplicating this on the other tracks. You can do Sound Copy + Sequencery Copy to replicate this track on the other 3.
If it’s a problem with the synth engine then you should be able to narrow it down this way. There’s no way all 4 synth tracks would fail in the same way.
But the Synth engine is quite in-depth, so it could be a number of things.
Browsing through the manual this looks like a possible cause:
From Page 70 of the Analog 4 Manual:
Envelopes:
The amplitude envelopes and the assignable envelopes offer 12 different shapes, consisting of six basic shapes each with two different trigging behaviors. The envelope shape graphics give an indication of how the envelope will affect the modulation destination. The left portion of the graphics shows how the envelope behaves when it is rising, i.e. the attack phase, and to the right the falling behavior is shown, i.e. decay and release. The rise and fall can each be either linear or exponential, useful in different applications as described below. A dot to the left of the visual representation of the envelope indicates that the envelope will restart from level zero each time it is trigged. Envelope shapes without a dot means the envelope will start from the level it had when being trigged.
I’m guessing your envelopes aren’t resetting in time before the next kick
using very short note length, decay and release to make sure the envelope has time to return to 0 before the next trig
not using envF at all (although i did try changing its settings to see if it was subtly affecting things - nope)
i agree that something looks and sounds out of sync here… hope i can find it or get a repair.
at some point i’m going to try to find (or write) a quick sysex utility to dump the sound settings from the file - not having a real librarian tool is making this stuff way harder to talk about and diagnose.
and this was right after an empty reset (and yes, i remembered to turn f1 boost and osc drift off haha), so unless there are some really weird defaults, this should basically be a raw triangle wave.
i’m pretty convinced there’s some sort of timing issue going on…
hah, not exactly - i paraphrased. they said i’ll get more stable sounds if i turn osc retrig off, and that resonant filters “live a life of their own”.
the self-oscillation on the A4 sounds very good to me
Your patch is very, very simple. Essentially an unfiltered triangle wave that decays slightly before stopping abruptly.
This is not what I would classify as a “Kick Drum”. It doesn’t have any transient punch or click. It’s more of a bass tone.
Anyway, from the original image your waveform has some serious clipping in it, which makes me think you’re driving your soundcard/macbook pro inputs way too hard.
The sound that you’ve programmed should look like this:
For the record. I recommend that you check out the percussion presets programmed in to the A4. They are an excellent way to learn percussion synthesis on a standard synthesiser.
