Hey been looking at one of these for quite some time and had a couple of random questions that I haven’t been able to find answers on.
Is it possible to arm recording and have it start recording as soon as MIDI note on is detected? eg. arm record, start playing on the keyboard it will then start recording. This is really useful to be able to “punch in” chords etc at specific sections of a pattern or simply to avoid missing notes at the beginning when recording unquantized.
Is it possible to momentarily record during playback while holding down the record button?
These are both features of the EP-133 that I love.
metronome can be configured to either be on all the time, only on during recording, or off all the time. The metronome can also be output from the RK008 internal speaker, or alternatively sent to a MIDI channel (IIRC? I think an update added this…)
We’ve just released RK008 firmware 2.47 which has quite a list of fixes and improvements, some on frontend, some not so visible but overall it was quite an overhaul! Here’s a list, in no particular order :
FIXES:
Behaviour of VEL2C/KEY2C/RND2C MIDI Effect changed to auto thru note messages by default (it’s easier like this switching FX).
Muted latched Arpeggio MIDI FX state when you disable the effect.
Added ‘note buffer full’ indicator (you can send a ‘note panic’ with ALT+STOP when this happens - but now you can at least know when it has happened)
Fixed possible hangup/reboot on BLE+save+MIDI data combo
Fixed Ghost notes in MIDI Delay / chords FX
Erase SysEx event now possible in nerd mode
Changed Track auto-length-record indicator to AUTO-REC (ALT+1 menu)
ADDITIONS:
TRACK REC MACROS in the ALT+3(Merge) Menu:
Added Time Humanize, Velocity Humanize and > Track Reverse, functions which can alter or create a REC buffer to play with your recordings.
RANDOMIZED VELOCITY
Double tap velocity presets (ALT+4) to select change the velocity modifier into a randomness version [R].
ADDED REMOTE MIDI CONTROL
Now you can also control the RK008 track velocity and transpose via a MIDI Controller (see MIDI Implementation sheet in the RK008 manual) Transposing on a music scale and using Velocity scaler as a volume slider is a lot of fun: have.
MONOMUX MIDI FX:
Added a special polymux flavour to go full monophonic MIDI! - even on polyphonic synths. Tap twice on the Polymux MIDI FX to play with this effect
QUICK MIDI FX ROUTING
In the MIDI FX top level menu, tracks will indicate if they have the FX active. You can toggle the shown FX in the menu to a Track by directly pressing the Track1-Track8 buttons.
AUDIBLE BATTERY WARNING
The RK008 speaker will sound a warning signal when you’ve fitted Nokia 5C battery which is low on power.
SONG MEMORY USAGE DISPLAY
When browsing through the Songs in ALT+9 you can now quickly see song memory usage while browsing through (and easily detect if songs are empty).
SONG SAVE CONFORMATION
Before actually saving a song (ALT+9, REC,REC) you will be presented with a conformatioon dialog.
SONG TRANSFER
In the Song save/load we added an option to quickly dump a song (all 100 Parts) / all songs (all 1600 Parts) to another RK008. Another connected RK008 (TRS or BLE) will pick up the data dump and the transfer will start automatically.
Gawd I wish they would make a larger office calculator sized unit with all this functionality and more. Love the little guy but would love a larger version with some cv gate outs and other cool stuff.
I’m curious, could this little thing be used to store and recall “snapshots” consisting of either a group of sysex messages or a group of cc messages ?
I would consider it as a companion for the Moog Matriarch which I hate for its “global settings” impossible to recall in a live situation.
All I can tell you is that a 008 is super tight timing-wise and I use mine as MIDI clock master only. I suppose I could test clock slaving, although unsure what to test clock slaving with, since its my tightest sequencer…? Any suggestions?
I sometimes even clock slave my Elektrons to it when recording, its that tight…
Oh right. I did use it at one time with my Tascam Model 12, which always needs to be MIDI clock master. I dont recall having any issues with clock slaving, recorded a few hour multitrack with it at the time… So without testing it with the latest OS, chances are it’ll work fine clock slaved (to a TR-1000, I’m presuming? IIRC you just bought one, and it likes to be clock master AFAIK)
It works for recording and playing back cc messages for sure. As for recording and playing back sysex, no clue, I haven’t tested this use case. For your use case, I am not sure whether it would be efficient with the Rk8, better to ask gerrit directly on the Rk8 forum or via the support mail.
I use my TR-6S as the master clock, running into the RK-008 directly via its trs midi in port, and then from the rk-008 out to my other synths and stuff
Do you think the rk008 is suitable to record small ( or long ) midi phrases to mix and match on the fly for realtime performances ? Clip launching workflow ish ?
Anyone recorded mpe datas from osmose or equivalent ?
Thanks.
You can definitely record midi phrases to mix and match on the fly, it has 8 tracks that can play at once and you can record into them and then mute/unmute them as you wish, so you could do it that way.
As for recording MPE data, it CAN - but your available space will get eaten up too quickly to be very useful. They kept the storage per song at only 64k I believe? To keep it compatible with the Alesia MMT-8. In practice, it means that CC data chews up available space pretty fast and MPE is kind of out of the question
