Why is Elektron soo bad at Pads

We could somehow collect texts and videos than make a seperate thread and anyone can can sign it who feels representet

Here we go … playing piano since a child …

True … and how we learn to kick them down … a good piano keybed reacts on the most sensitive push … give a key a short and week impulse and there is a light pianissimo … it has a very quick return of the key after it is released as well. Very quick staccato is possible on one key, with many colours.

The weight of the key, which in terms of physics would be inertia, and the force applied by a finger are very well balanced to allow such expression. And to be fair … those keybeds have seen some hundred years of development and experience :wink:

IMO even the best pads can’t simulate this, because there is a distance and force to push down a key, which doesn’t compare to any pad I know.

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Maybe a way to “personalise” the responsive curve of the pad to make it more or less exponential or adversely linea in it’s response would be a great request.

ARs do seem to have quite an inverse exponential curve in responsiveness, to the point where you feel you need that little bit more, but you are scared you are going to break the unit if you hit them any harder…

I can set response curves in FL studio for MIDI, that help negate the differences in “feeling” between different technologies…different response curves may help…

That would improve the response definitely. But I am not sure that this will be enough. As I said, at the piano it’s the resisting force and the distance, which the key has to travel in combination with the force or impact the finger implies.

May be that a simple silicon pad with a pressure sensitive sensor underneath is limited technically.

May be a combination of material and thickness of the pad with an optimized mechanical resistance, more distance to move and a sensor which is sensitive to this would help.

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Yeah I would say that the response you get from real instruments like a piano is never going to be replicated on rubber pads.

There is already a long thread about how to improve the pad sensitivity by an hardware hack. I’ll guess this fits well to the discussion here.

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Hey thanx :slight_smile: didn‘t know that. But it doesn‘t seem to be solved. A few new carbon sheets from elektron for the mk1. But as far as I read noone used the other sheets really. Also all those hacks would break warranty.

I know some people used cork in bad akai midi keyboards to improve them.

I would also consider a diy hack if elektron would be willing to not break warranty for the whole unit. Also the hack must be really good. And I think without the possibility to calibrate the pads from the user level we are not getting anywhere

As anyone ever heard of hidden service menus on the rytms?

Surely someone in this community already has a thorough Test Plan and test cases written already for continuous improvement on pad quality for finger banging on gear.

Absolutely … we are all engineers :smiley:

We need videos

Just got my M:C yesterday, cool.
Everything is as expected – except the T-16 ‘velocity sensitive’ pads. They are very, very hard to play.

That is: I have to hit them very, very hard to get an audible sound. I can hit the trig keys to hear full volume, and that is plenty loud. But the T1-6? I have to POUND the crap out of them for what I’d call ‘standard’ playback! The hell?

Yes, I know I can go in and change the settings, but I’m still shocked out how seemingly poor the velocity sensitivity is – whatever the settings are.

When I watch YT videos of the samples and cycles, it seems like the video creators are just tapping the pads to get playback. But maybe they aren’t? Maybe it’s hard to tell in a video how hard they are actually hitting them? I dunno, but man, coming from Maschine, where the pads are extremely sensitive and a light tap will trigger a sample, it’s very awkward to have to hit the thing this damn hard to get even a normally playable level.

So far I’m just focusing instead on using the Grid Recording and trig keys and avoiding ‘playing’ the T1-6 pads.

But, ideally I’d like both options. Is my hardware ‘faulty’? I can imagine one or two pads being ‘faulty’ – but all of them? Seems unlikely.

But I just want to confirm that this is, in fact, ‘normal.’

The level is so low when you ‘tap’ a pad, that at first I thought something was wrong, that the T1-6 were not in fact triggering sounds at all. It was only later I realized that no, they were triggering sounds when I tapped them, but so quietly that I hadn’t even noticed it.

ok, repeating myself.
thanks,
-m

Same here. I was really surprised how stiff the M:C pads are, coming from playing a Tempest and Akai MPD. When I first tried the M:C I couldn’t hear the kick because noises from me hammering the pad were louder!
Fixed velocity mode can be activated via the pad menu, it’s more bearable that way.

Getting a M:C significantly cooled my GAS for a Rytm, as it doesn’t seem friendly to finger drummers either.

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I sold it because of that. Elektron just don‘t get it. They at least could have made them calibratable.
I won‘t stick to such poor decisions in design any longer.
Rytm is the same…they just don‘t bother.

Rytm mk2 feels great to me… I’m not a huge finger drummer but I can put in some high hats with no problem nice and soft compared to push 2 pads and good velocity range…

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I like my Mk1 pads…seem to work fine to me for how I use it. Maybe elektron should’ve stuck with MDUW way.

Thanks for the feedback. Push 2 felt alright to me, and that’s engouraging to know.

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My guess as a programmer is it boils down to cost. When a pad or button is pressed the signal needs to be “debounced”, which means to detect rapid fluctuations as the finger hits the pad and lifts off, and filter them out in order to avoid multiple accidental trigs. This works very well AS LONG AS the processor reading the pad is fast enough. You might see where I’m going … if Elektron is using a single processor in their machines as a design philosophy to save cost, that means they are not putting in dedicated micro controllers to debounce the pads, which I suspect is what Akai does (and Korg did very well on the PadKontrol) in order to achieve maximum sensitivity. The CPU is likely too busy doing audio synthesis and other tasks to do that level of debouncing, so instead they simply set the threshold very high, where you are pressing so hard that there is just no chance of the signal fluctuating.

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Thank you for your insight.

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whatever…I have given up on them even considering. Sold the Cycles because the Pads are just plain crap. Even Ess said they seem to hard for him, but nothing happend. Couln´t be that hard to just patch an option for sensitivity because they have to be calibrated somewhere in the machine.

Rytm Pads maybe slightly better but still same problem. Way too unresponsive for expressive playing and no sighn of even awareness. It´s a nice machine nevertheless. But in my optinion will all those marketing stuff not work (even a hip space in Berlin) in the end if they don´t listen to customers.

One has to admit that their market is not finger drummers (though what’s the chicken and egg here: no finger drummers or no drummers for fingers :thinking:)

Performance, scenes and mutes work splendidly.

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