Polyphony with RK002 issues

Elektron Gear Digitakt
#1

I posted this on the RK002 forum but it seem less active so I thought here might be a better suited forum, maybe someone has a solution?

"let’s say I play, on an external midi controller, two notes with my left hand as a long drone. so it addresses voice 1 and 2, then I start to play two notes with my right hand and the first two notes addresses 3 and 4. so I reach maximum polyphone set to 4 and all good here.

then when I release the two notes on the right hand and play two more notes without releasing the two notes on the left, but it cuts the sound on my left hand even if I have two voices freed up. it always cycle 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4 no matter what the release of the note is.

It would require a note taking over where it should wait for the note OFF before releasing and some sort of preferences where you can chose bass notes have priority or long note priority…

another scenario is this

I have one note playing a long sostenuto drone, and another note playing quarters… after the third quarter the voice will take over the lower note, even though I have 3 voices unused…
(increasing the polyphony, just move the issue later. but still it will cut the low note, even without NOTE OFF has been sent)
it needs to have some sort of NOTE OFF priority
I hope I explained it clear?
Is it possible to address this issue as it makes the cable basically useless to pay it in real world situations?"
any idea? someone had the same issue?

#2

Well 4 voices is the midi polyphony per midi track but assuming you’re using a midi track to control the audio tracks which are monophonic the behavior of next sample taking priority over last sample makes sense, as on a single track samples choke each other out.

I don’t really know anything specific about how rk002 works but it sounds as though it addresses the polyphony by using one midi track to control 4 audio tracks and it has a protocol which cycles in the way that you stated:

so, the sample of the first audio track (long drone) is choked out by the next incoming message, and this makes sense because the device is not polyphonic as a sampler though the sequencer does support midi polyphony of 4 voices per track.

I would infer that this is a limitation of working with a device which is not capable of doing what you want it to do, therefore this workaround has a limitation which you’ve now discovered.

There may be a way to fight through this by using an additional midi track and more audio tracks, but I just don’t know enough about the rk002 to advise you of a solid work around. It seems as though having one midi track assigned to 2 audio tracks instead of one midi track for 4 audio tracks on one side and then the other midi track having the normal 4, this would still leave you with (hypothetically) 2 free audio tracks after the midi loopback and then using a split keyboard mode on your controller to address both midi tracks at once, that might work?

Either way, you need the left side and the right side to not overlap in the pool of tracks from which they’re drawing audio otherwise the cyclical behavior will always go back to the first track played and that’s what you need to avoid.

Even better would be use split keyboard mode and assign the left side to control half of the audio tracks and the right side to control the midi track with the 4 audio tracks that you’re currently using, that way the left side won’t interfere with the right side as long as you don’t have the same audio tracks assigned to both. I dunno, you would have to try it to see if this works for you. That exhausts all of your audio tracks though if you set 4 to each side (4 midi channels on the audio side and the single midi channel for the quadra-polyphonous midi track on the other).

Unfortunately, unless someone else has already overcome this limitation, I’m not sure there is an existing published answer specific to your concern.

#3

Any chance it’s been discussed in the other Digitakt RK-002 polyphony thread?

https://www.elektronauts.com/t/polyphonic-digitakt-via-retrokits-rk-002-cable

I don’t have any info myself. I use the RK-002 for other features (not polyphony) and I don’t typically use it with MIDI loopback

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