First of all, since this is my first post in this forum, hello everyone!
So I (finally) received my Analog Rytm yesterday, spent the evening learning the basics and jammed with the machine for a couple of hours.
One feature that is very important to me is the “Direct Jump” pattern mode – actually it was a major reason to buy the AR.
It’s great for building “lively” rhythms that are composed of multiple patterns that you “juggle” with to create variations, insert fills, and so on.
Pattern changes via the AR panel mostly work as expected - the new pattern starts playing immediately at the current position/step.
For some reason, “sometimes” – I have not yet figured out how to reproduce this reliably – the new pattern is queued instead of being activated immediately (the pattern number display, e.g. “A01”, starts blinking in this case).
Selecting the same pattern again when this happens activates it immediately so this is not a showstopper, just a bit annoying.
This morning I hooked the AR up to my PC via USB MIDI in order to record the MIDI events which I expected the AR to send when changing patterns via the panel.
That’s when I hit a brickwall:
The program change events (on channel 14 by default) are not being sent as expected.
Apparently the AR only sends a ProgChg when the first step of a pattern starts playing for the first time after a pattern change.
This means that if, for example, you have a 16 step sequence where pattern A01 plays for the first 8 steps, then you change to pattern A02 to play steps 9…12, then to pattern A03 for the remaining steps 13…16, the AR does not send any program changes at all!
I tried different “CHNG” settings in the advanced scale menu but that didn’t fix it.
All patterns have the same scale settings, btw.
Transmisson (and reception) of program change messages is enabled, of course.
Is this a known issue ?
There’s another thread on this forum Receiving Program Change Messages Not Responding Immediately that addresses a similar/related topic.
What worries me is that Elektron released a firmware update one month after the other program change issue was reported and apparently the update did not address/fix it.
I have two weeks to return the AR. I like the machine but (at least for me) the program change issues are major showstoppers.
Is this still being worked on and will this be fixed in the next update ?