When I first saw the announcement of the Syntakt with these 4 performance oriented mod channels (retrig, velocity, mod A/B) I was excited and thought that it would add a layer of live performance tricks, a bit like the performance modifiers and channel of the OP-Z.
In the end, this is huge deception for me I can’t find any usage for them. I’m even starting to get annoyed at that strawberry light being on all the time with no way to turn it off, with a chance of triggering sounds by mistakes because of the last 4 keys.
My gripes:
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No way to sequence these mods in their own dedicated channels, my biggest issue. If we could sequence the mod trigs in their own 13-16 channels, now that could really add a whole new performance level, especially when playing with mutes. We could create sequenced fills and variations and just activate them when needed with mutes, now that would be useful. That’s also what I expected when I saw the announcement
And it would also make the lack of live quantization more acceptable. -
No live quantization: my second biggest issue here. Even when trying to be in perfect sync with current running pattern, triggering the mod buttons live never sound quite right. If it was quantized, it would be awesome to create live rolls with the retrig mod for example, but as it is it’s too risky and most often ends up sounding like a mess.
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No temporary cut of the running channel sequence when a mod trigger is used: triggering the mod buttons adds on top the track sequenced pattern (unless you mute it), ending up in a mess if you’re not perfectly tempo synced (which isn’t possible because of the lack of quantization)
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No trig-less mods: except for the retrig mod, it would have been awesome to have an option to disable the sound trigger when activating the mod but keep the mod being applied, like temporary p-locks on top of the running sequence. This would make these mods a bit more useful for live scenarios IMHO.
My disappointment is quite big regarding this, I fail to find any useful scenarios of mods for my usage, as I never use live record for my sequences (the only useful scenario I can think of).
What’s you take on these mod channels, do you find any use them in your performance workflow?