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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@JohnnyEgo I was wondering the same thing about MPE controllers recently, it seems like it would work very well in theory. (I bought an RK-002 and then realized I don’t have a MIDI interface that can change its default controls; I also have an iPad with Drambo that can do midi processing, so I’m trying to decide to do with the RK-002.)
@_max cool stuff, thanks for sharing!
What about Syntakt ?
Edit : ah, iirc it may not work with midi DIN…
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Is interesting, because you can control all “poly” machines parameters (RK002 maps incoming channel CCs to all “poly” channels).
So I got it working in bitwig, had a bit of a think but essentially not that difficult: a note fx selector set to round robin (well free-robin to be exact) 8 different channel maps, each sending the auto channel to one of the 8 midi channels for the digi tracks. Made another note fx selector for the analog voices consisting of 3 channel maps.
Really pleased with such a simple solution.
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Hi, I’m interested if we can have proper polyphony work just by the internal note priority setting in Syntakt? I tried this, and it has unexpected behaviour when I set 3 separate tracks with different settings. The tracks receive on the same MIDI channel.
No. They would have announced it !
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totally happy with mono. just saying.
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I sometimes use the Midihub from blokas.io with the Elektron Syntakt.
Midihub – MIDI Interface & Stand-Alone MIDI Processor
That works really well too. It is often needed in the Dubtechno area for chords.
There’s even a patch
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