Polyphonic control of the Syntakt is regularly requested around here, and understandably so. Many of its machines lend themselves well to polyphonic playing, but there’s no apparent way of doing it on the ST itself.
So this weekend I did something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time - hook up a midi keyboard and my Blokas Midihub to the Syntakt, and test a few polyphonic patches. The Midihub has a round-robin style polyphony program that distributes incoming notes from a single channel to multiple channels. For example, when setting up eight digital machines on the SY with the exact same settings, you can play the ST like a standard polyphonic synths. You can also set up two distributors to get 2x4 notes polyphony, for splits or layering.And 3 note polyphony for the analog machines. Etc.
Tweaking an 8 note patch is fairly simple, just use Control-All when adjusting parameters. You can also set up slight differences between the machines to get more variation, which is quite cool and can get you into Vermona Perfourmer territory. Or completely different patches if you like.
I wasn’t sure where to post this, but decided on the Science Labs as I would love to hear about alternatives. I know the RK-002 Smart midi cable can do something similar. Please post other alternatives here, if you know of any.
Here are some examples. Mostly crappy noddling on my 2-octave midi keyboard
SY Bits
(note: the chorus effect comes from the Syntakt delay, slighlty modulated with an LFO)
Less clumsy than I imagined The combination of few parameters overall and the easily accessible Ctrl-All makes it easy to access imo.
But I guess my main point is to show that there are workarounds to one of the most requested features of the ST. Yes, it is certainly a workaround, but since polyphony in the ST is unlikely to appear, this is possibly the best you get
My next Syntakt video is going to be about making a big 3 OSC Mono sound out of 2 SY Raws… So I know sometimes you have to improvise a bit to get what you want
This is great.
If you’re DAW based, you can achieve pretty much the same with a little midi utility called midi polyphony. https://thepiz.org/plugins/?p=pizmidi
For this entry, I did some Polyphony on the ST. I’ve build a Chord progression using the same Machine on 3 different Audio Tracks (one Note per Machine). The fact that each note of the Chord has its set of Parameters makes the Chord more interesting.
I purchased the RK-002 and tried to work it into my work on the Syntakt, but it just wasn’t for me. I got it working from keyboard, with midi loopback, and once more for good measure just now from Bitwig (NoteFX preset for controlling tracks/channels 1-8 below). There’s just something about the extra layer of fiddle—control all for every parameter change, and the extra fiddle with the notes being distributed across tracks. Respect for those with the internal processing power to keep their flow in it…
I have wanted to make the Velocity mod do exciting work to the sounds while playing polyphony from keys, but nothing magical was happening today.
Syntakt was originally supposed to be a mini Rytm, which changed on the fly to something a bit more open ended drummer/synth instead of drum synthesis & samples. However, since this was not originally planned for it, like for DN for example, implementing it at this stage might be challenging from a technical POV… also, product overlap and all that
The RK002 MIDI cable can also do this in loopback mode - connect MIDI out to MIDI in and use a MIDI track on the Syntakt to play other tracks polyphonically.
Hehe, I’ll leave that to the very skillful people already in these threads. Always lots of great/interesting stuff and it is wonderful to hear what can be made if just focusing on on machine.
Regarding polyphony, ok then, lazily bringing in an old thing
(Btw, the SP TWINSHOT poly is at 2:40 in the video that @LyingDalai linked)
