Hi,
Are Syntakt’s tracks always mono? I can’t find a word about voice allocation which you have for example in A4.
Yes.
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Yes syntakt is monophonic. However there is a chord machine that makes up chords for you. Also I think it’s 4 voice polyphonic over midi when controlling other gear.
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Thx! I think that’s perhaps a crucial point for me to NOT trade my A4 to Syntakt. Quite often I use my A4 as 4-voice polyphonic synth for ambient chords etc. I was hoping that I could do the same with Syntakt.
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You can do the same with Syntakt by allocating 4 of the machines to a synth sound. You can use the digital machines or the analog machines. You can tune the machines like you would tune oscillators. The analog dual VCO machine can be very interesting when used this way. The Syntakt is very versatile.
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But you can’t play those voices polyphonically via the onboard chromatic mode or a midi controller. Unless you have some accessory that splits your midi into multiple channels. Isn’t that right?
On the analog four, you can simply play polyphonically if you choose.
There’s a sample project on the Syntakt with like five tracks using the same machine and playing like a single polyphonic track. Really impressive programming, but doesn’t seem easy to do.
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If I understood correct, you can of course put to 4 tracks same sound to make kind of ”4 voice synth” but you cannot play them with external MIDI keyboard like a 4-voice polysynth. That’s the main thing I was after.
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Yeah you can’t hold more then 1 trig down at a time. However as I mentioned above, the chord machine is pretty neat though! Don’t dismiss it! I did some jazzy thing with it last night that I loved, but of course polyphonic is always better if only we had it! But the chord machine is quite interesting and can get wild when using the LFO’s and destinations etc.
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There are also a couple of dual voice synth machines that can be tuned, so while it’s not exactly duo-phonic, you can get chord-like sounds out of it and use parameter locking to change the chords across your sequence.
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I noticed this too, and set about figuring out how it might have been programmed in one go. The hardware tool MIDIhub has a “dispatcher” function that splits polyphony over multiple midi channels, and I tried it with the iPad program Drambo and a keystep hooked to that, with the “Mono to Poly” module. I’d bet that’s how the author of that pattern (A07 or thereabouts, right?) did it.
It seems like having a new “neighbor” machine type to catch polyphony overflow from adjacent tracks would be the way Elektron might conceivably handle this if it were on their feature addition list?
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I use mine as an 8 voice polyphic synth as outlined by the Digiphex Electronics video.
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That’s correct. You would need to sequence the trigs as usual but it’s not as daunting as it seems… it’s just different.
I was just checking (and hoping) that Syntakt would use same clever voice allocation like A4. In A4 you can have different sounds in every 4 tracks but depending on musical situation you can divide 4 voices to either 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 tracks. Very flexible.
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Pseudo polyphonic e-piano.
RK002 cable
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Hey was just trying to do something similar using bitwig and overbridge, but although redistributing every incoming note to the next midichannel is fairly straight forward, the next note seems to cut the note on command (leaving tails in release still audible as they should). So basically i can’t play chords, but i can play fast arps with all tails audible. You seem like a smart guy who knows what’s missing here, you might have a tip or two (although i don’t think you use bitwig). Something with note offs?
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I don’t know exactly, I didn’t write any midi processing script concerning polyphony. So yes, alternating midi channels, but the tricky thing is that notes off midi channels have to correspond to notes on! You must remember note on number to send its note off on same channel.
An interesting thing is to restrict alternated channels to non-held notes (not sure how to express it correctly).
I think you can read Retrokits RK002 scripts on their site, eventually Midipal scripts, (open source).
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Thanks for the quick reply sezare… i’ll keep trying for a bit with your info!
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Let me know ! I’d definitely check existing scripts.
wouldn’t a simple MPE controller (KMI Qunexus) allow polyphonic behavior?
yes. if set to three or 4 voices and on the Elektron it’s then midi channel 2,3,4,5
channel 1 is a control channel in mpe which is not set.
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I had that need and wrote this https://www.midispatcher.online/ (not mobile friendly and might be buggy… I haven’t spent much time on it), you can use the NoteRoundRobinMachine to dispatch incoming MIDI signal to multiple channels.
In this setup my syntakt uses track 11 to sequence MIDI chords (four notes) sent back to the first four voices.
Obviously you can connect a dedicated MIDI controller and use it as input instead of looping the syntakt back into itself.
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