Hi,
Basically, I’ve made an hours worth of music in Cubase (14) for a performance in July, and I’m trying to get that programmed into the Play+ to use that as the brain for everything else.
At the moment, I’ve got it connected like this:
Computer → Play+ → TR-8.
Playing the drum tracks to the TR8 though the Play+ works fine.
But what doesn’t, is getting the midi notes from the computer recorded into the Play+ (as a midi track).
If I try the full patterns, with “Live Rec” on the Play+, the resulting pattern is a bit of a cacophony, as if the machine can’t handle recording that much data - which is only 5 notes.
If I try each of the drum sounds into the midi track individually, it seems to work better, but the timing is all over the place - slightly better with quantise off.
Attempting to step-input the patterns into a midi track seems to have its own issues.
With the view layout set to “Piano Notes” and the pattern length set to 64 steps - it appears I can only have one note per step??
As in, if I select a step and try and press two notes (for example to have kick and snare on the same step) I only get one of them??
Am I doing something stupid?
The manual hasn’t been much help. I even ran it though Google Notebook LM, which helped with other questions, but for this it was giving confllicting infomation, where I think it was confusing audio tracks (which are monophonic) and midi/synth tracks which are supposed to be polyphonic).
I can play the synths (VAP/WTFM) with more than one note at a time fine over midi.
Does anyone have any ideas how I can get my drum patterns into the device?..
I asked NotebookLM again, this question using the latest manual:
“How many notes can be on each step on a midi track?”
Based on the sources and our conversation, here’s how you can input multiple notes onto the same step in MIDI mode and the related capabilities:
In Play+ MIDI mode, the tracks are polyphonic… This means that a single MIDI track can transmit multiple notes simultaneously from a single step, effectively allowing you to place chords on a single step…
While MIDI tracks are polyphonic, the live recording process on Play+ is described as recording chords/notes into selected tracks… For instance, a triad chord (3 notes) played live would typically occupy 3 selected MIDI tracks10.
Select the tracks you want to program notes on… The number of selected tracks determines how many notes (voices) you can program simultaneously in this view… A triad chord would require selecting 3 tracks.
◦ The algorithm generates chords and distributes the notes across the selected tracks.
In summary, while the underlying MIDI tracks are polyphonic and a single step can hold multiple notes (most explicitly demonstrated when using the Chord Preset knob…), some workflow methods like Live Recording and the Piano Roll view utilize multiple tracks to manage the input and display of individual notes within a chord. The Play+ overall operates with up to 8 voices, meaning a maximum of 8 notes can sound simultaneously across all synths/MIDI tracks…
Which would suggest that the midi tracks aren’t actually polyphonic in the sense of them each being able to play “up to 8 notes”, but that the total number of notes they can play “at the same time” is 8.
Unless you have a step set as a chord.
Do I have this right?
As it does change the use of the machine quite a bit!
So in my case, I can’t have all the TR8 notes playing on one Play+ midi track.
As I would need to use however many midi tracks as there are sounds playing at the same time…
Which is actually quite restrictive when I’m attempting to control 5 other devices from the Play+
Thank you for the reply.
Would that suggest that there may be proper polyphonic midi tracks in the future?
Is it technically possible with the hardware?
I have a work-around for what I was trying to achieve:
I’m using the play+ in conjunction with a “Zynthian” box, in which the “ZynSeq” sequencer can trigger midi patterns from a note (it’s bit like Ableton Live in a Raspberry-pi-powered box).
Which can also take midi clock from the same source (Midronome), so I just need to export 8-16 bar sections from Cubase as midi files and all should be good.
Best thing to understand the Play/Play+ is, that is just “tracker” (as a concept of computer music production software) with different UI, and even the MIDI part uses the same principles.
So you have some lanes on which one event at time occurs, that event has some parameters.
In case of MIDI, sample number is being replaced by midi channel, velocity, chord (as identifgication of the chord, not a notes in a chord).
So it is completly different approach to “standard” linear computer sequencers as cubase…
So i don’t think that it would be ever able to do that, what you want as it is completly different approach… But there are different boxes (not made by polyend) which are more close to “cubase” than to “tracker”
Thank you for the insight.
It’s only in the last couple of weeks that I’ve been actually trying to understand it properly, even though I bought it last June.
Now that I “get it”, it might not be quite what I was expecting (with the polyphony etc) but I might still just buy another one to make easier the transitions between songs when playing live with it.
(As they will be synchronised from the same master clock device)
Cubase is just what I write with, as I’ve used it since version 1 on the Atari.
For this project I’m trying to go laptop-free for the performance.
and it looks like if I utilise the sample tracks more, I can actually get the majority done with the play+!