Thanks a lot guys !!
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I ordered the Play+
I jumped on getting the play the moment it was available. I think it’s a stunning piece of gear, flaws and all, AND I’m frustrated with this recent development, AND I’m super excited to try the + AND I’m bummed about the extra money spent lol.
I’m gonna get it today, maybe I’ll end up trading the OG Play or having two around. It’s so fun and musical, but I understand people’s frustrations for sure.
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I really like the sound of the new synths on play+. the patch editing list is a weird choice tho when there are a plethora of knobs available. I think you can set 5 macros per patch. it’s weird tho.
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I can definitely understand people avoiding Polyend for now. I love their stuff, and not a big fan of the way they do certain things lol.
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Behrinher is terrible. It feels very unfair to put Polyend into the same scale.
At least they do have their own original products.
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20 characters of amazing. That’s really good. Thanks for sharing.
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Love how you used the Play+. I’m considering getting one myself next year and pairing it with my Tracker. Heavily considered a Play before but a number of limitations with the device kept me from getting one. I think Polyend did enough here to sway me.
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Played with the Plus last night. Out of the box it felt buggy. I updated the firmware and that helped with some of the occasional weird behavior.
The synths sound really great, and the piano roll helps a lot, but inputting melodies still doesn’t feel as easy as I’d like it to be.
Loading samples still takes a lot time.
I’m a little disappointed, especially considering this is a whole new machine.
I really love the play and what it’s about. When it gets going it’s so so fun and sometimes the results are really spectacular and surprising.
I’m gonna hang onto it for a few weeks before choosing to return it or not, and I’m hoping it gets/feels less buggy as I use it.
Congrats on becoming a member of the Polyend beta testing team!
You can now vote to ask for rudimentary functions in your Play+.
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Is the Play+ still monophonic on the sampled instrument sounds side? Meaning that if you want polyphonic sounds you have to use up multiple Tracks?
I never liked the fact that if i wanted to play a Chord with a Piano sound i had to use up 3 or 4 tracks to play that chord. That’s way too much overhead to manage when composing. Still curious if this is still a limitation on the + hardware.
I mean i can play Chords on the new EP-133 which has to be subpar chip wise to the + don’t ya think?
I agree the Chord side is Meh…still tempted again for the USB audio and probably better loading times
Started working with the og Play again yesterday and this morning. I had forgotten how much fun it is. I still have yet to use it with my Tracker in midi synth mode. But I was thinking that it might actually be a good work around for the chord issues described above if you have a tracker around? Load up the piano sample as an instrument in tracker and play chords that way?
Personally, inputting chords into the play as individual notes doesn’t bother me very much as I always end up using micro timing on each note of a chord, so I’m going to be doing it manually anyway, but…. Does Does Play midi side send chords (as chords, not individual notes)?
Edit: It does.
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This remains true, this little rectangular unit is still so much fun.
I managed to sit down with the Play+ last night and created my own sample pack using stereo samples. I haven’t gotten around to the synths yet - that will be later this weekend I think.
Some notes:
While the limit to samples per project is 250 or so (255 total with a 3 minute limit at 44.1k/16b stereo), I found that I could only get about half that file count using stereo samples before the memory was full (using drum hits and single notes).
I initially just made the basic folders needed for a sample pack, which means folders for Kick - Snare - Hat - Bass - Synth, and then loaded them with 50 stereo samples each for a total of 250. The total size of the sample pack was about 50mb, since these were all short one-shots. I wound up having to pare that down to 25 samples per folder, and about 26mb of total file size. So I think there’s a pretty big YMMV factor to the space in the RAM for sample loading. The manual mentions you can get up to 3minutes of stereo and 255 files imported - I think that’s under separate, ideal conditions (like loading a single stereo file that’s 3 minutes long or 255 extremely short, mono one-shots).
The manual is pretty explicit about what the Play+ can handle as far as Sample Packs are concerned:
So I think some strategic decisions are needed when managing samples. It’s probably better to make your kick, snare and bass samples mostly mono and panning them in Play+ rather than using stereo files for the sake of getting more bang for your buck per project.
I’m excited to dig into the synths next time I sit with it for sure.
I really love the drum sounds you used here. Did you make your own sample packs? Or is this just the factory content?
The “feel” patches are unique to the R8 though. They effect the groove/push-pull of a beat. Interesting to read about but is one of the things Sean mentioned in those twitch streams.
Also mentions lots of other things that got used in different tracks. Sunvox, renoise, deckard’s dream, mpc1000 though those things mostly by Rob.
But doesn’t matter really. Whatever they use they know it as well as it someone can know a thing and they make it do Autechre music.
The Drums are all factory samples … but I used a few samples of my hydrasynth patches. The exciting thing about the play is that the boundaries quickly become blurred and you end up using sounds as “drums” that were never intended as such. Of course, this applies to every sampler, but the play feels like it was made for exactly that. nice surprises
Play+ vs a digitakt & Roland S1
discuss 
what would your thoughts be Sub?
Digitakt + S1 all day without a doubt.
Play+ without a doubt (just kidding). The synth parts seem way better and versatile than Roland S1 (and it’s multitimbral). On the sample side, Play+ is a lot weaker than Digitakt (no proper enveloppes, no LFOs, no slicing) but the sequencer seems both more complex and more fun than Elektron’s one.
The last point to have in mind is that Polyend abandons very quickly their hardware, letting it buggy while Elektron still updates with great surprises 10 years old devices.
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indeed.
play+ os has a bang of beta off it. it’s hard to know what updates will come. fun lookin sequencer tho.
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