I posted a bug report on these, but Polyend closed it with a nonsensical response – it appears they didn’t understand the issue.
When you record notes into the Tracker, even if you have gate length turned on as an effect, if your note is shorter than one step, the Tracker will always quantize it to the step length, and then terminate with an OFF in the next step. So this means that you cannot record short notes on the Tracker! And it also means that you have wasted a step with an OFF when you could have just set the gate length.
This is profoundly irritating. Can anyone think of a workaround, short of going back and manually editing the gate length of each note?
To make matters worse, you cannot have both micromove and gate length turned on as effects, for no good reason at all. Gate length is simply ignored. This means that if you want a short note that’s delayed by a bit, it’s actually impossible to create one, even manually. Any idea how to get around this?
These are big errors. I can’t think of effective workarounds to them.
Okay, yeah was not clear because you wrote on the tracker. So basically you want output short midi notes.
The duration of a midi note is definded by the length of a step. Therefore you can double the tempo to get a higher resolution of a pattern. For example 240bpm gives you 32th at 120bpm.
Then divide the clock externally by 1/2. I use a e-rm multiclock for that purpose.
I also created a wish to do this in the tracker here:
I don’t think this is a feasible solution – increasing the tempo changes everything about the song, not just the note lengths. And not in a good way. You can easily make shorter notes without having to increase the tempo (and thus shorten the pattern time). Just shorten their gate length. Unfortunately the tracker can’t do that for MIDI notes when recording live – gate length gets pushed to the next step and then you have to manually edit it. This is clearly a bug.
Additionally, you could have multiple short notes rapidly in succession (using multiple tracks of course) if you allowed both micromove and gate length; indeed this would be the natural way to record them in. But the tracker disables gate length entirely when micromove is included.
I’m going to admit this is one of the few annoyances that I face with the Tracker. @Patrick is totally right to point towards adjusting the resolution, but it’s a solution that works more when you keep that concept in mind when first building songs, otherwise as mentioned, it throws the whole song off.
I’ve have learned to keep resolution in mind, and take advantage of the tracker’s built in expansion/suppression of tracks to more or less work around this, but I agree that it’s not ideal.
Totally off topic, but just what to let @Patrick know how awesome it is to have people like you consistantly engaging and trying to help people here. You are officially awesome!!
By “time”, in this context, I had meant the length of the pattern. If you have a 128-step pattern and you just want to be able to have some notes that are even 1/4 of a step, particularly ones which are delayed by 1/4/, 1/2, or 3/4 of a step, you have now cut your effective pattern length to 32.
So I think you’re right, there’s no reasonable solution.
Just for personal interest, in what real world scenario do you need a sequencer wich is putting out midi notes of 64th duration? Wouldnt there be better solutions like adjusting the envs on the device side?
Really curious as a composer who has done clicks and cuts in the early naughties😄
Edit: and i certainly would work with automating the env decay time or note offset via cc.
If its that event heavy i think i would run into the 24ppq limits of midi with a full blown 16 channel setup😅
I’m not sure why you’ve selected 1/128 duration here, but that’s not my use case. Let’s say that you’ve settled on a step being a sixteenth note, and you need 8 bars, so you’re at 128 steps. Now I need to do 32nd notes, or perhaps 16th triplets, or a series of grace notes, or stacatto notes. I can’t play these in, as gate is not supported for short notes; and I can’t have a series of them, as Polyend for some reason doesn’t provide micromove and gate simultaneously.
Another scenario: let’s say I’ve decided that a step is a quarter note, so I can have 32 bars in a pattern. But a few notes need to be sixteenth notes. I could easily do this if I could use micromove and gate at the same time as FX; but Polyend weirdly prevents that.
Yes, you wrote 1/4 of a step wich corresponds to 64th notes.
For 32nd notes you double the tempo, half the step so to speak. You end up with 64 pattern length. I am okay with chaining two together but i get why you are not.
I think the big item is that if I don’t want quantization for short note lengths, then we have to have a pretty high resolution. Otherwise a note length of (say) 19/20th of a 16th note gets quantized to a 16th note.
Note that if I recorded a note length of 21/20th of a 16th note, that is simple. The tracker would just set OFF as the next step with a micromove of 1/20 (that is, “5”).
So Polyend is in the situation where you can make record a note of 21/20th of a 16th note, but not 19/20th of a 16th note.
And of course, if I want a note that’s 17/20th of a 16th note but starts at 2/20th, so it ends at 19/20th. That is literally IMPOSSIBLE TO EVEN MANUALLY ENTER. And yet if I wanted a note that’s 17/20th of a 16th note long but starts at 4/20th, so it ends at 21/20th, that’s TRIVIAL to manually enter!
So if i get it right, you do not want any quantization at all.
Perhaps a tracker is not the right choice then, a grid always has to be somewhat rasterized.
Resolution has its limitations here.
Note duration, metric position and the relationship between two notes are also “grid based” in a notation, though you can always add more complexity with smaller note length or just say ad libitum…
