Hey, I’m a new owner of the Mess after a suggestion by Matt at Alexander Pedals. I’ve been searching 16 years for a pedal that can do pitch shift based arpeggiation that I can use to drive a bass synth pedal. I’ve been through pretty much everything on the market including Pitchfactor, Moment Machine, Colour Theory, Adrenalinn III, and SY200. The closest I have come so far is the Moment Machine and Colour Theory but there’s no ADSR for each step. So two steps at the same pitch end up one step of double the length.
So that brings me to the Mess. I’m still finding my way so I’m hoping for some guidance. I’ve been messing around with the One String patch as a basis for setting up what I hope will be a sequence. I’ve reduce the patch down to a single effect on track one called 'slice’. I can set up four slicing effects and assign pitch to each track. By mixing the tracks I can come up with one 16 step sequence consisting of four notes (one per track). However when I access the settings for a step in the track I’ve set up, I see that semitone setting is available but when I change the pitch for that step, it affects the pitch of the whole track, not that specific step. I don’t understand why and have to ask whether this is intentional or not.
I was hoping to be able to tweak semitone (pitch) separately for each step in a track because it would then offer four independent, arpeggiated and melodic 2 octave sequences to potentially play with and that…would be utterly mind blowing.
Could anyone clarify the design intention for me? Many thanks.
To do this put your steps on the sequencer where you want them, then hold down a active step and while holding the step / pad down then you tweak the semitones parameter (or other parameters) to your desired number and then do this for each active step.
Yes, t have set up a 16 step sequence with an active step every 4 steps on one track. All the other tracks are off and the routing is 4 tracks in parallel. Nothing complicated. And I have accessed the settings for a selected step by pressing the pad down for that active step and adjusting the semitones setting as you have suggested. But, like I mentioned above, the semitone setting changes pitch for the other three active steps as well. I’m assuming this means it’s the whole track that is affected but feel free to correct me on that.
I looked into this and it definitely looks like all of the effects in the micro looper category has a bug with the semitones parameter to some degree. I reported it.
One more thing, the pitch in some of the steps is not stable or consistent. It warbles and while this can be improved with reducing the speed, the lack of stability makes it impossible for the synth pedal to track the pitch. I don’t recall that the Moment Machine or SY200 ever had this issue, they could be tracked easily enough by the bass synth pedal.