Hello. This is my first post. I’ve had the DK for a while, and I’m slowly getting to know how things work (I don’t have any other Elektron gear, so it’s all new to me). I’m working on a 32-step pattern and I have one trig on step 1 on track 4. The trig length 12 steps, and I want the release to extend into part of the next 16 steps. I started increasing the release time, but I noticed that the note died rather quickly after the 16th step. If I play the note by pressing the key the release is quite long, but I’m not hearing that when the pattern is playing. It may be worth noting that the pattern was originally 16 steps (with trigs on other tracks), but I increased it to 32 before entering the trig on step 1 on track 4. I’m wondering if that could be part of the problem?
Okay, I realized that would be easy to test, and I went to a blank pattern, increased it to 32 steps before entering any trigs, entered the trig on step 1 of track 4, and then increased the release time. The release now works as I’d expect. So it seems the action of increasing the steps from 16 to 32, with the the sequencer duplicating steps 1-16 into steps 17-32 has caused this release oddity, even though there were no trigs on track 4 at that time (to the best of my knowledge, certainly no active trigs). Well, I can work around it so I guess I don’t really have a problem–just wondering if this is known behavior?
Sounds like it could be voice stealing. The other tracks could be using up your polyphony.
Try changing the voice allocation for your track to fixed 1 or 2 rather than dynamic (D).
If you put the trig down first (say on step 1) and then add the second page, the contents of the first page will be copied to the second page (so you’d end up with a trig on step 1 of page 2). Perhaps that’s what happened?
DampSquid: Thanks for the reply. I didn’t think about sound stealing–that could be the issue. There are trigs on the three other tracks, but only one each–however, two of those are arp sounds, so they could be using more than one voice each. Also, I was trying to make the arp sounds continuous across the pattern so there may be a 1-16/17-32 boundary issue (maybe I should remove the step 17 trigs which were a result of the pattern length doubling and make the length extend the full 32-step pattern–might not fix it, but could be a better way to program the pattern).
I’ll try to mute the arp tracks and see if that makes a difference…
hrrld: Thanks for the reply. Yes, I know about the automatic copying when the pattern is extended. But I did the extension when there were no trigs on track 4, so there was nothing to copy. I added the trig on step 1 after the extension. I think DampSquid is may be correct about voice stealing…
Arp sounds shouldn’t need more than 1-2 voices so try limiting those tracks to 1 or 2.
You only have 8 voices to work with on 4 tracks. So if tails are ringing out then you’re probably using up all of your voices fairly quickly (as you suspected).
You can get some similar effect of tails on the arp tracks by utilizing the reverb and delay as well.
Airyck: Thanks for the reply (and the welcome!). If arp sounds only need 1-2 voices then I don’t see how voice stealing should be happening: tracts 1 & 3 are arps, and tracks 2 & 4 are ‘simple’ sounds. Even if all of them took 2 voices, that would still only be 8. Looking at the voice menu, I don’t think I ever see all 8 voices active (although things are blinking fast). Looking at each track with the others muted I only see one voice used at a time for even the arp tracks (unless there are slight overlaps I cannot discern). Tracks 2 & 4 are lit for a long time because of the long lengths and release times, but the arp track voice durations are very short (but could be overlapping slightly and I cannot see it).
Anyway, here are my results of checking when track 4 stops playing (pattern length = 32):
T4 only: T4 length = 16, T4 release goes through step 32
T4 & T2: (T2 length is 9), T4 release goes through step 32
T4 & T1 (arp): T4 release cuts off at step 21
T4 & T3 (arp): T4 release cuts off at step 20
T4 & T1 & T2: T4 release cuts off at step 21
T4 & T3 & T2: T4 release cuts off at step 20
T4 & T1 & T2 & T3: T4 release cuts off at step 17
So something in the arps seems to cut off the T4 release. It may well be voice stealing that I cannot see due to the way the voice menu shows usage (and/or my inexperience). In any case, I’m going to do the T4 part on an external synth using MIDI which will solve the problem.
