Elektron Musical Instruments

On Thursday, September 25, 2003, at 09:50  AM, ripe wrote:

>
> I had been thinking about the way MnM stores kits instead of patches...
> Although it probably would take some major work from Elektron, it 
> would be
> nice to actually have a way store individual patches that could be 
> loaded
> from the kit edit page.  Maybe under the "SYNTH" list there could be a
> "USER" machine type and then all of your stored patches could be 
> selected
> individually here.  Saving patches in kits seems intuitive for a drum 
> synth
> but not for a keyboard synth (although I would like to save individual
> patches in MD also!).
>

Probably the most well-thoughtout implementation of patches that I have 
seen in a hardware synth was QuasiMidi's Polymorph. The Polymorph was a 
four part synth, each with step-sequencer, so it was similar to the MnM 
in concept. What the Polymorph offered was two levels of patch storage. 
The first was a common, shared library of sounds that could be purused 
and used much like any other patch setup in other synths. Each pattern 
also had four slots, one per part, to store patches. These patches were 
completely separate from the master linrary patches. So you could 
easily load up four copies of the same patch into the four parts and 
tweak each one separately. The tweaked versions were saved with the 
pattern and the original remained unaltered in the master library.

A few other synths I have used have had this separate storage of 
individual patches from multi-patches. I personally find it difficult 
to use a synth that only offers a single master library (so if you 
slightly modify a patch it must be stored in a new location), and one 
like the MD and nor MnM that only let you store within the pattern (or 
kit) make it difficult to reuse patches (which is not always a bad 
thing either).

I think the MD's kit scheme was fine for it but I don't believe it will 
work as well in the MnM (as we are now finding out). I like the idea 
suggested above of having a library of user patches available for 
loading into any of the six slots. Some basic sorting/filtering would 
be nice so, for example, you might select based on machine type, or 
perhaps a simple category system like that found in most workstation 
synths these days and even now most VAs.

That said I do personally find that the way the MD works, and the MnM, 
encourages a fresh approach to each composition. Its more work but it 
also keeps me from falling into predictable results.

drK

www.delora.com/music
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