[Daniel] Something about MD-bugs and MM and MIDI
2003-11-26 by tahvenaine2002
Hi, I'll just type here couple of things, which I think only you are able to answer. 1. MONOMACHINE AND MACHINEDRUM MIDI LATENCY I've been building my homestudio and been trying to setup everything to answer my musicmaking techniques. Ive setup the elektron gear this way: Cubase SX sends midiclock to both units via RME hammerfall midiport. With the midiclock it also sends transport commands (Start, stop, continue). Then I I've setup Monomachine and Machinedrum so that they receive transport commands, but do not use midiclock. This way because I want solid bpm timing and I'm using songmode (chopping patterns) a lot. So now I have dreamsetup where I can for example put cubase to loop 8 measures and when I hit play from cubase, all machines start ticking in sync and I can start sequnecing both MM and MD. Well I almost have it and here comes the problem: I've noticed and measured that Monomachine reacts to miditransport- command (play) in about few ms (4.5 exatcly on my rme midiport). But in the Machinedrum it takes about 25 ms!! So you can see it's reacting to play command pretty slowly, which makes hard to do groovy hihats (exepts if you want a really groovyones :) Is this something that have been overlooked possibly or somekind of bug or just the way it is and which can't be changed?? This is not a audiocard latency since I've tried it with 1.5 ms latency from rme card and I can get tight timing with Monomachine. One solution to this problem would be that I could use the midiclock from cubase in both machines, but I don't like it, because the tempo drifts. I like the tight MD timing. And without using midiclock I can also do 150 bpm beat on a 100 bpm song, because the bpm isn't taken from cubase. If there is possible to do something about this in MD it should be pretty high on to-do-list, because like the way it's now, it's hard to sync it with any gear if you can't use the midiclock. (If somebody else knows a work around for this or knows anything about this I would like to hear) 2. LINKABLE MACHINES IN MONOMACHINE You once mentioned that elektron could do a machines link-able like in MD, if people would like to have it. I stating here that it would be VERY NICE to be able to layer them like this. Of course you can always copy track notes from track to another, but it's really more userfriendly to have it a linkable way. Another point on tihs that someone made, that there isn't a machine in MM that has a normal saw+pulse+noise synth tonegenerator. With linkable machines this would be pretty easy to complish. If there would be linkable machines it would be very nice if the volumes (not levels) would also be linked in a relative way. So that I make a parameter lock with volume -15 (80->65) points so a linked machine would also go down 15 points (55 - 35). This would be a very essential in machinedrum where you can make a new snare sound by combining two machines and then trying to sequence them with varied volumes for liveliness effect. If anyone else is interested in linkable machines this could be a good moment to speak out. (as elektron is doing the final candidate OS) 3. MD-BUG This happens a lot of times but I haven't found way to reproduce it. In songmode the mute column does not work. It appears but nothing happens with the squares when you try to change them. This happens almost every time I'm doing something with song mode. I usually do a lot of chopping of pattern with offset and go back and forth from pattern and song mode. Once this happens there is no way this is going to fix by itself, it needs to be power-reseted. 4. ANOTHER MD-BUG This one happensin 1.11 and I haven't tested it on 1.12, but I'll write it here anyway, because I'll forget this if I don't and you can see if it's allready fixed. (or somebody can test it (I'm not with machinedrum right now)). Take one machine and link it to e12-machine (this is easiest to hear). Now sequence the machine and e12 triggers nicely. Fine. Now go to track with e-12 machine and put one parameterlock there with long retrigs. Now play the original pattern and you should notice that the e-12 machine stays on parameterlock after the seq has run over parameterlock and it won't change to normal. This makes it impossible to do velocity sensitive snareing with linkable snares, because when you do parameter lock on original machine the second machine has too much volume, ok you go to second machine track and fix it with parameter lock and then the volumes stays there and the next snare sounds wrong. I hope I'm explaining this clear enough. Huh, what a post... Toni.