Mono/poly handling

[Epicycles]

Ahh well, thanks for these explanations. That does all make sense, and I do hope the developers will contact me for more details and fix my issue. I found that I was able to message Stalker directly and did do that, so thanks for pointing out that messaging exists here.

I did indeed file a bug/support issue on this website within an hour or so of my first post on this forum (a week ago or a bit more).

I have a thought. In Step mode there is the Poly view and the Mono view. Some sequencers have a Mono/Poly setting per track (or instrument/channel for sequencers that define those). I don’t see that on the Pyramid. Is there any such thing that I’ve simply missed or forgotten about? Are there any other settings that would affect the treatment over overlapping notes?

There is a funny thing about polyphonic sequencing. Overlapping notes with the same note numbers do have legitimate musical uses. But because stuck notes are a problem for sequencers in general, it is possibly a reasonable defensive measure to send NOTE_OFF(x) before NOTE_ON(y) when x==y. After all, most controllers cannot send NOTE_ON(x) NOTE_ON(x) NOTE_OFF(x) NOTE_OFF(x).

So I wonder how much of this kind of processing Pyramid does. I’ll check this behavior in detail as well as the pads thing, because it may have some bearing on the behaviors we’ve been seeing.

[thetechnobear]

Ive moved this to a separate topic.

the only thing I know of that affects polyphony/overlapping notes is the ARP fx.

I think its ‘debatable’ that a sequencer cares about polyphony handling or not, or rather leaves it up to the sound source - as its part of ‘voicing’.

so, all of my (poly) synths allow me to determine how its going to handle polyphonic notes, so is it playing them, treating as mono, playing as an arp… so I don’t need the sequencer to do this.
and a mono synth, also already decides how its going to handle polyphony thru the midi.

I guess there is a use-case, if you want to play a poly synth in a mono manner … but does your poly synth not already support this?

@Epicycles

There is a funny thing about polyphonic sequencing. Overlapping notes with the same note numbers do have legitimate musical uses

yes, indeed, if you are using expressive controllers (as I do a lot ) , then this is actually very useful
however, the reality is, MIDI is very poor in this regard - basically we have to use MPE (or some form of note per channel) to do anything useful here…
and up until recently, very few things supported this use-case… I guess because 95% (probably more :)) of musicians using midi use keyboards (or piano roll like sequencers)

unfortunately, my experience is LOTS of instruments (hardware and software) really do not handle having the same note played multiple times very well… IF you are lucky they will ignore the second note on, and second note off… but Ive had a few synths that will get ‘confused’ by this - the designer simply did not expect this, and cause things like hanging notes.

as for the pyramid, Ive played with it recording MPE (onto multiple tracks), but honestly its not really designed to do this (and never will be) …
there are multiple problems :

• you end up with far too much data on each track (caused by the continuous AT and CC74 message) to be fun to edit
• cc74/at are not attached to notes, so you cannot ‘move things’ around nicely.
• each note is on a separate track.

so you basically end up with a blob of stuff that cannot be edited… at which point you might as well just use a much simpler midi recorder.

but frankly, even now daws are starting to have MPE support (and so per note expression) , often its still too much ‘fiddling’ to edit particular notes… so I often only do if I played something ‘wrong’, but in this case, in might be just as easy to practice more, and just play it right
… so often , I end up just recording audio and forgetting midi altogether (*)

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( * ) I admit , this might be partly because when I first started playing expressive controllers , there wasn’t MPE, or any daws that supported per note expression… and so I just found it easier to use audio tracks (like a convention instrument!) rather than a ton of disconnected midi tracks.