Me too, man. Making the track buttons blink when they fire off a trig would add so much useful information at a glance. The track blinking on the downbeat is likely a kick or bass note, while the track blinking on every step is likely the hihats. The only way to check now is to play the keyboard to audition the sound, but even that might not be enough if there are sound locks. Muting and unmuting tracks is a cumbersome way of doing it.
There are blinking trigs on the A4, on the FUNC+MIX polyconfig menu. Trigs 1-4 will blink when firing off trigs, but you can’t tweak parameters from this page so the usefulness is limited.
On the AK, this is broken. The lights flash in Polyconfig only if all voices are off (all mono).
If the voices are enabled, the lights are fully ‘on’ all the time. They should do an inverted flash when lit but it’s not worked for years, and maybe never has done.
I don’t need to see them flashing all the time, but if holding FUNC could make the TRK buttons flash, that would do it for me. Would mean you’d know with more certainty which TRK you’re about to mute.
On all modern Elektron devices (correct me if I’m wrong), it’s possible to see which tracks are playing notes by way of some blinking lights on the note on events. However, on the Analog Four, you have to go in and inspect the actual pattern of each track to discern whether something is going on there or not.
So, my feature request would be that it would be nice to see which tracks currently are playing notes.
Edit: lol, I saw that this exact thing was discussed just a couple of posts up. Oh well.
SRR (sample rate reduction) and BRR (bit rate reduction) parameters per track. Only one knob required for each but would really broaden the palette of sounds possible with A4. perhaps with the option to select whether the effect is post/pre filter?
Sample rate and bit rate are characteristics of digital synthesis.
They could potentially be applied to the effects, but these don’t make sense in terms of the analog sound engine.
Maybe you could apply this after the digital converters which I think are available per track. But that would be at the end of each tracks signal chain.
Does the Analog FOUR send parameter locks/sysex from the MIDI out or is it just midi notes/velocity?
Would be incredible if it sends everything out so you can use the box as a sketch tool and then perfect stuff in a DAW later or is there another way of doing this?
The manual controls send CCs, but the sequencer only sends MIDI notes. The MIDI sequencing capability was only added as a very late addition to the (much better) CV/Gate sequencing.
It’s basically either a self-contained box or you can record the audio in the DAW to manipulate later.
Relatively new AK owner here with a few comments, observations and/or questions that could serve as feature requests. I am more than happy for my ignorance of the machine to be revealed. Here goes:
• Is there really no way to record joystick and pitchbend movement?
• I am disappointed in unquantized record. Seems the resolution is quite low. It’s not really unquantized as it won’t recognize quite a lot of what I play in. Feels like I am back in 1990.
• Would love control over track direction: reverse/ping pong/random/drunk walk etc
• Ratcheting would be good (with probability of when and how many). I guess I can probably fudge this using LFOs/plocks etc.
• Is there a setting to have the sequencer automatically follow the active section?
• I would to be able to set different values for pitch up and pitch down. Is this a setting somewhere?
• Saving sound and adding to sound pool seems to be overly complicated
• Random sound lock would be ace. Using a S&H LFO for random plocks is nice – is there a way to apply this to sounds (in the pool obviously)?
• Volume control of the sub osc would be handy.
• No sustain pedal on the AK? Really?
Is there any likelihood of any more updates to the A4 line or are we basically stuck with what we have - which is still fine, it’s a pretty cool machine already, just slightly frustrating at times. Nothing’s perfect eh?
And another: a better way to do “odd” time signatures. There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to view 4 bars of 7 for example. I’ve had to use a sequencer length of 56 to achieve this, unless I’m overlooking something. Please tell me I am.
An option on the Sound > Settings screen under Portamento so you can choose between exponential and linear curves for the rate of the pitch change. Poly portamento would be very welcome too!
The current behaviour is pretty extreme, it sounds nice for some uses but it takes a LONG time to complete the last bit of the pitch bend. The A4 sounds amazing with bending pitches but there are a lot of quirks with the various options to achieve that.
This one might be more of a bug fix than a feature request. On the performance knobs page if you hold Page + Clear it resets bipolar knobs to -63 and ideally it should be 0?
