I got the idea from this topic : Roland Boutique SH-01A - #519 by NickD
Very often, with hardware, or even software, I tend to focus on one TINY thing that’s not working properly, or just not how I would like, and that makes me almost forget all the things that I love.
That’s maybe just me, but I thought I’d share a list of these little “flaws” that stop me from enjoying an instrument, even if the remaining 99.9% are amazing.
Moog Matriarch :
In paraphonic mode, you can’t play short staccato notes since the latest firmware. A minimum gate length is applied to every new note.
Roland Sh-01A :
Lowest note priority. You can’t change that.
Any Elektron Sequencer (and most of the step sequencers) :
You can’t set the number of steps per page. So if you’re not working in 4/4, the downbeat is not at the same place in the different pages.
Novation Bass Station 2 :
Filter cutoff is smoothed. You can’t make abrupt jumps from Midi CCs.
OB-6 :
Different modulation destinations, but they share the same amount… So in practice you rarely use more than 1.
Nord Modular G1 :
The knobs don’t respond to CCs. Unless you explicitly put them in the patch. Would have been so nice to have a fixed CCs option.
Ableton Live :
From some actions, it spits out 16 reset Pitch Bend messages in a row, and this makes some synths (actually most of them) freak out, resulting in erratic PB values stuck on the synth.
yea that’s annoying, esp as otherwise its great with the DT sequencer.
more annoying for me is the same issue in Ableton Live’s pointless filter smoothing
Is that just a bug in the latest Matriarch firmware or now the intended behaviour? I don’t think I’d be happy with the latter if I’d pushed the boat out to buy one looking forward to all the paraphonic fun.
The tiny things are what they are. Tiny things.
Why bother?
Anyway, i support the current thing, therefore:
When im sitting on my Octatrack I’d like to copy all (settings, trigs, all of it…) from lets say Pattern 1, Track 1 to Pattern 2, Track 5.
Click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click
Damn I’ll check this. You mean the Autofilter Audio FX, or the onboard filters of synths/Simpler, etc ?
It’s been introduced in the latest firmware (that also allows sysex to access the bloody “Globals”, which are a SHAME). I’ve been struggling with their “support” for months…
yep, all devices that had the cytomic filter upgrade years ago. nothing wrong with cytomic filters, it’s ableton’s fault for adding the smoothing when the cytomic filters were added.
i found outafter a while that there’s no smoothing applied to mod envelopes, only autom envs, so that’s a workaround i’ve used for a long time. still, it sucks.
i absolutely hate it that the Ableton Push (2) has an amazing sequencer but you can‘t input note values in it via an external keyboard (like with elektron sequencers). Why the heck would they even light up the corresponding pads when you play notes on your masterkeyboard but don‘t let them affect the sequencer. Wtf.
Usually it’s not something minor that makes me hate a synth, but I essentially rage sold my Peak because of:
Novation Peak/Summit:
16 pages to set modulations, oh boy! Wait, I have to repeatedly press the next page button and can’t hold it down to cycle through pages? And the last page does not loop back to the first, so if I want to go from page 1 to 16 I need to press a little hard plastic button 15 times!?
similar Bass Station II grrr:
can’t press the left patch button to go from 0 to 127, nooo.
instead we have to hold the right button for like a half hour.
This. Often when I’m thinking up a melody and sit down to make it on my Elektron gear, it turns out it’s in 3/4 or 6/8 time. I have to “convert” it to 4/4 or deal with the downbeats being all over the place.
I made a feature request for “length per page” about a year ago where I show the problem in action, and edited together what songs with a 3/4 and 7/8 time signature would look like on the Digitakt if you could select length per page.
This is the kind of threads I like to see, I could go on for hours.
As per the original link, the MC-707 has had a number of these for me. Some have been fixed, but two key offenders remain: note events are processed too early with p-locks (before filter changes, for example), and the sample & hold LFO just seems to read data from a noise sample, or else has a fixed seed - which is fine until you set it to trigger on a note, which sends it back to the start of the sample, so you get the same random values every time.
The OP-1 really needs to either be a MIDI host or have a MIDI output - very annoying you can’t just pair it with a little MIDI synth to use the onboard sequencers.
The Mother-32 has too many useful features tied to the single assignable output AND like so many other offenders, no power switch. I’m pretty sure the rise of synths without power switches corresponds to the rise of restaurants serving food on shovels or planks of wood.
(I will say that Moog have clearly adapted along the Mother > DFAM > Subharmonicon journey, and each one’s UI / setup improves on the last.)
The input gain knob on the Mopho Desktop, I can’t even.
LFOs on the MPC One / Force are half-hearted - I’d enforce Elektron LFOs on all manufacturers if I could.
TR-8s - very nice, but a single LFO for an entire kit? Objection.
I could go on. Clearly many of my issues are LFO-related, I should probably mention that at my next checkup.
This page length FR goes back at least 10 years, they have likely had hundreds of people asking for it, there must be a reason why it can’t be done or I reckon they would have done it. I hope that any future Elektron gear will have it though.
One of my pet peeves is half assed CV implementation on sequencers - Elektron are one of the very few exceptions to this.
Pitch as a CV destination without glide is pretty dumb, yet most sequencers still don’t have it, and to not be able to have CV LFOs or envelopes or discretely settable voltage values per step with interpolation, makes most sequencers CV implementations look like a lack of understanding by the designers.
