I just got my Polyend Synth on Friday and I’m starting to wonder if I have a defective unit.
I am running up against a ton of double/tripple triggers when playing the pads. It happens a lot when I press a pad very lightly or if I press down and then slowly start to release pressure, the pad will trigger again.
Even worse, sometimes triggers will randomly drop, even when I play a pad with full velocity. I would say I can expet hear a dropped trigger about 3% of the time, give or take. It doesn’t happen all the time, but often enough to be very noticable especialy if I’m trying to play an arpeggio with my fingers.
I’ve messed with the velocity and senitiviity settings and I haven’t had a lot of luck.
Any advice is appreciated. If these issues a common and expected to be addressed with firmware, I can live with it but I only have 30 days to return to vendor if I need to look for an exchange.
I experienced double trigger and a strange behaviour only one time when I used the synth as controller for another midi synth and the active synth on the same area of the grid was set on sequencer mode. After deactivate the sequencer everything went ok. I think the sequencer data are not transmitted on midi. But I don’t know if this can help you.
I did open a ticket with Polyend and only received one response. I wrote to them again a couple of times and got nothing back from them so I just sent it back to the retailer. Bummer. Maybe when they release a 2.0 firmware and add some type of song mode or a way to sequence the chord changes, I’ll buy it again.
After spending some time with it, I found it very difficult to find a proper application for the Polyend Synth, outside of some general noodling before bed. What bothered me most was the implicit insistence that the Synth is meant to be PLAYED not sequenced (ItS nOt a GrOoVeBox!). Sure, okay, I can dig it – but the problem of course, was mine was not actually playable. Not with the double-trigger thing happening. It sounded like absolute ass when I tried.
The novelty of the chord-followers wears off very quickly when you realize that you have to constantly thump the pads to build out any type of arrangement. Like with any synth, a user wants to sequence that sort of thing so that focus can be applied to tweaking knobs and parameters. The fact that you can’t use something like a Digitakt to sequence the chords was also a massive letdown. Had I known that before I bought it, I wouldn’t have.
For a minute I considered keeping it and just latching chords and using it as a drone synth but to be honest, that would be absurd considering everything Polyend tried to cram in there.
So yeah – a pretty cool device with some great ideas in there, nice layout, I was digging the user interface and menus – but in my view only half finished and not ready for production.
Ah, sorry to hear OS. I definitely have found the most updated firmware is better, but still a few issues here and there. But if the keys aren’t triggering the way you intend, that’s just not going to work for anything.
Sorry it didn’t live up to your expectations. One thing that is clear with Polyend products is that there are so many who love them because they make these crazy innovative instruments that no one knew existed, and there are those who discover it’s simply not for them. Both sides are completely valid. Nothing is made for everyone.
Thanks for sharing your experience and hope you find the tool that suits your needs
And to be clear, I adore my Polyend Tracker. It’s the only reason I took a chance on Synth. I suspect with a couple of firmware updates and maybe if I can get my hands on one that doesn’t have the physical issues I had with mine that I’ll have a better experience next go around.
Many of the presets use some of the deeper functions to create interesting and appealing sounds. So not to miss the obvious, try this:
Load the PMD engine preset “Brucephalus”, select the Exicter page with the engine button, now turn the Mallet parameter up to 90%. Is your play now behaving with the double triggers you describe? If you turn this down to 30%, has the double triggers gone?
Good luck/
