Hello all.
I am a logic user and use lots of soft synths plus a Korg Ms20.
I am looking at cheap Analogue 4Mk1 synths on UK ebay and have a couple of silly questions.
Am i right in thinking that, with the latest firmware, I can use it as a 4 voice poly synth?
If I set each voice differently, can I play a four note chord where each note is a different voice / sound or will it just play four notes of the same sound?
I understand that each voice or track has two oscillators and a sub oscillator. Is it possible to set up a 4 voice unison monophonic synth where those 4 lots of 2 oscillators can be stacked ontop of each other?
I love the idea of a poly synth that will play slightly different sounds (with different filters / modulation with each note or a monophonic synth with slightly different voices ontop of each other.
Yes, both would be possible. A4 can be played as four voice poly or you can use the four tracks to play slightly different sounds. There’s also a setting to play four voices with different sounds alternating with each key press.
*Edit doesn’t have to use all four voices ofc, any combination is possible.
Excellent!
So… can you play a four note chord where each note is a different sound?
I saw this as a feature of the Vermona Perfourmer - but i think i can get an A4 for around 500 uk pounds.
…u can make it any kind of a 4 voice polysynth…
…but u won’t use it as a poly…anyways.
…these 4 mono synth are truu analog mono voices, that can switch digitally to any kind of sound setting at any given moment…!!!
and once u do this, u never gonna let that go again…promise.
it’s “only” 4 voices per moment…but hundreds of realtime sounds per track…
Or a device with a round-robin midi filter. A little off topic, but I think the iSEM app from Arturia (or the SEM V plug in) can do this type of patch really well. The Arturia software simulates the old oberheim polysynth where you had to manually adjust all 8 voices by making 8 offsets of the main patch and you can go through them in different ways like random and round robin.
Great price! I think you will find lots of great ways to use the A4.
I think i understand. To play a four note / four sound chord, i would need to have 4 midi channels with one note on each.
Still, the parameter tweaking for each seq step sounds mind-blowing!
Ah, my bad. Right, with “use track sounds” this will work. I’m simply to used to work around this issue from other Elektron machines that I forget that the A4 is different in this regards …
So, if I choose ‘use track sounds’ in unison mode, it will stack the four different sounds and
in poly mode ‘use track sounds’ i can play four sounds as a chord?
There is also multi-map mode. An interesting thing to look into- where you can have key ranges that play a certain preset. That’s where a lot of the power comes in for me on the AK, but you can still do it on the A4. Don’t know if that helps, but good luck!
You can also do the Korg Monopoly thing if you check ‘use track sounds’ and set the poly allocation to ‘rotate’. That way every keypress will trigger the next voice in sequence.
I’ve actually used that quite a lot, also use track sounds + rotate (Mono/Poly voice rotation) is just awesome. Pan voices differently, tweak them differently and run them through a delay.
Throw arp at the A4/AK. Pure bliss^^
With performance macros we have control over all voices simultaniously + we can tweak them individually.
I was put off by comments that it can’t be done, haven’t used it in a while, but played with it yesterday again. One of my fav features.
