Just before Elektronauts started up we had a thread on Elektron-Users about Note Slide and portamento on the A4, and I just wanted to port some of the comments across so we could continue the discussion and give Elektron some useful feedback
Here is my comment:
Well, it’s not so much emulating a 303 perfectly (which I don’t want it to do - or rather, I don’t want it to be restricted to those parameters). I just mention it as one the best-known examples.
It’s more the basic concept of note slide. Pitch is just one parameter that goes into making a note, if you see what I mean. When you look at the Note screen on the A4 it also includes velocity, length, envelope and LFO retrigger. When I slide a note I’m expecting all those things to be incorporated, not only the pitch and envelope retrigger. I am trying to slide two notes into each other, to make one note. It’s illogical to change the gate separately.
Right now it ignores velocity too, so if I slide two notes of different velocities into one the characteristics change in the middle of the note. This is very undesirable: suppose I am adjusting velocity using an LFO or by hand, but I want to plock some notes to play at a fixed velocity. If I am using a note slide I have to plock or unplock both note trigs. If I do not do so not only do they have different velocity but the velocity jumps instead of sliding.
Of course I can get around this to some extent by using Parameter slide, but length and velocity and fundamental characteristics of a musical note and it is strange that they are not included in the note slide operation. It’s also very bad for workflow, since it means a lot of extra plocking, and if you change your mind about the slide and want to remove it or put it somewhere else then you have to remove/change all those plocks.
I wonder if this is something to with the envelope retrigger oddities that make it hard to do portamento at the moment. I don’t think I’m the only one who finds the current behavior a little strange.
And here are some remarks from other users in the same thread.
KingJDub1978:
This thread reminds me alot of the struggles I always have with the A4 when trying to program a sequence that conatins some nice legato.
to achieve this I have to play with note Slide as well as the settings on the NOTES page ALOT… Length, Envelope retrigger, etc. It’s always a very tedious workflow for me to get a nice natural sounding legato sequence playing. Having that many parameters to mess with at once to achieve what I need can get frustrating and bring a loss of focus on knowing what each step really needs to be set to.
Darenager:
I don’t like how the slide sounds now much either, it seemed to work much better a few OS versions ago - but it wasn’t ever really that intuitive, and yes it would be better if note length was adjusted when a slide is entered, maybe an option to set the behaviour would be a good feature request.
Regardless of if you want to do acid or 303 stuff, the 303’s slide mode is much better than the A4, because it requires less button pushing and is a better implementation.
Dacava:
Yes… a more predictable slide would be most welcome. I find I could create more convincing acid riffs on the machinedrum. I would just load up a single cycle sample (saw or pulse), use an LFO on the EOG for a bit of vibrato, and parameter lock the notes with various pitch settings, and the notes would slide perfectly into the next note, everytime. It is not so easy with the A4. I can get some interesting riffs, but there not exactly what I had in mind when working though some patterns.
Sorry about the formatting. Something is badly broken with the text editor here.