Moog Music Forum

Have tried six different ways to get POLY to work, no luck.

I have a LP Tribute with 2.2 software and a Taurus with 1.12

Seems simple enough in the manual but when I set it up using either the LP as #1 of 2, or the Taurus as the master #1 of two, I get nothing but inconsistent strangeness.

Help!

I have an LP Stage II and the Taurus III, and have also tried every which way to get the poly to work, with no success. From what I can tell, the error is with the T3's firmware. The LP behaves as it should with poly-mode (plays every first, second, third note - according to the poly-settings), but the Taurus just stops working properly when in poly, whether it's first in line, or later. Hopefully this will be taken care of in the next T3 update.

Also, even if the poly-mode worked properly, I think it would be an odd combination - though not necessarily bad, as it would be difficult to control what plays what. In the case of a scale or melody, the LP would play a note, then the T3, switching back and forth. And I would assume that in playing two notes at once, the first note played would go to the first in line. It would be fun if one liked the erratic switching back and forth of the two different tones of each machine. I should add that in not having a functional poly-mode, I can just surmise as to how it would function.

What's worked well for me is to set the T3's keyboard priority to low notes and the LP's keyboard priority to high notes. I use the LP as the controller, and can then play two, juicy analog notes at a time, with a reasonable amount of control over the notes played by each unit.

I didn't know that poly chaining an LP with a taurus 3 was to be an option. Cool if it works. I know LP to LP up to 8, I think. Does Taurus to Taurus work yet? I don't think voyager to LP works, could be wrong through.

You could midi chain the LP out to the taurus in, set the LP to high note priorety and do low taurus drones held on the LP keyboard and play the LP above it.

What about Lil Phatty to the new Slim Phatty? Would that work?

Yes. The plan is to have all slim phatty features in the new LP OS so that integration and polychaining will go smooth.

yay! Gonna save some dough for one

Phatty to Phatty and Phatty to RME (or Voyager) reportedly works as does Voyager to Voyager (bloke demonstrates that here): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqEWGL3v ... re=related It's a bit rough and makes me want to go out and kick my dog but I can't imagine that the experience is much different than what my family deals with when I'm creating sonic mayhem.

Slim will also work and the general thought is that if you cough up enough dough, you can get yourself a 4 voice (8 OSC) Slim Phatty Array for tad more than $3,000... still a bit pricey. That's alot of hardware there for the 'simple' requirement of having more than 1 voice (ie. you don't need all of the extra filters or LFOs or ENV generators, especially if you cannot leverage an LFO from one unit to do interesting things with modulation (stacked) on the total sound.

My opinion is that Moog should have integrated an interface port that could have been leveraged for a 'programmer module' (ala Oberheim 4 voice) that will allow all a) settings to be overridden by a master patch and b) for keys to be distributed in round robin fashion.

Otherwise, my opinion is that the feasibility of having 4 phatty's in an array would make nice YouTube video but isn't really practical or economical and instead I would like a simple split point that could be set on the kbd with one voice south of the split and one in the upper range with optional transpose feature.

Holding a note and having the 2nd note play a melody is just too difficult and I have to think that as you play (freely) as you would like, that at some point, the existing POLY feature will get confused and send the wrong note to the wrong device.

I've done poly with my LP and RME for a while now.... It's not the smoothest way (it goes a 1 note first on one synth, second note played on the 2nd synth kind of way that can be a bit touchy at times) but it definitely works...

Hopefully the LP's to Slim's will work smoother and better... I mean.. you could save and wait for Moog to come out with a poly that sells for 5K or up.... or you could have 6 slims, all seperate synthesizers to themselves... which means not only can u polychain them, but there are countless number of other things you can do with them together. I almost think its a better buy to go this route.

EMwhite wrote: Holding a note and having the 2nd note play a melody is just too difficult and I have to think that as you play (freely) as you would like, that at some point, the existing POLY feature will get confused and send the wrong note to the wrong device.

Thinking in these terms I did a little experiment with my own gear:

http://www.moogmusic.com/forum/viewtopi ... =7&t=10057

EMwhite wrote: Slim will also work and the general thought is that if you cough up enough dough, you can get yourself a 4 voice (8 OSC) Slim Phatty Array for tad more than $3,000... still a bit pricey. That's alot of hardware there for the 'simple' requirement of having more than 1 voice (ie. you don't need all of the extra filters or LFOs or ENV generators, especially if you cannot leverage an LFO from one unit to do interesting things with modulation (stacked) on the total sound.

All of the filters and envelopes are necessary if you want a true polyphonic synth, and not just a polyphonic tone source. To demonstrate this try setting the phatty to low note priority, and midi out to an organ sound, patch the output into the phatty's filter and play with that. Now imagine (or use a sustain pedal) that all the organ notes are incessantly droning because they don't have envelopes for their vca's.

jeepo wrote:

EMwhite wrote: Slim will also work and the general thought is that if you cough up enough dough, you can get yourself a 4 voice (8 OSC) Slim Phatty Array for tad more than $3,000... still a bit pricey. That's alot of hardware there for the 'simple' requirement of having more than 1 voice (ie. you don't need all of the extra filters or LFOs or ENV generators, especially if you cannot leverage an LFO from one unit to do interesting things with modulation (stacked) on the total sound.

All of the filters and envelopes are necessary if you want a true polyphonic synth, and not just a polyphonic tone source. To demonstrate this try setting the phatty to low note priority, and midi out to an organ sound, patch the output into the phatty's filter and play with that. Now imagine (or use a sustain pedal) that all the organ notes are incessantly droning because they don't have envelopes for their vca's.

Yes. I certainly understand this. What I meant was that a full featured Poly would have several OSCs processed by a single set of VCA and Filter envelopes and my point was that it would be useful to provide stacked modulation on the final signal.

Certainly with a bunch of LPs, you can have different tonality per voice, etc... that's super, but if all of the routing were there, you could have 4 types of modulation for instance on a single grouped sound.

I guess, I'm not too good at explaining this. But I'm pretty familiar with the Oberheim Matrix synths and one of the powerful features was the fact that you could have numerous routings and modulations.

Personally, I'm really looking fwd to Amos's demo of the 4 voice. The biggest challenge of implementation is how to dispatch the keypresses and if you've spent any time with an Oberheim (where you see each voice light up as a dot on the LED) or a DSI with individual LEDs per 8 voices, it becomes interesting as you play four note Suspended chords or triads, or three notes + a bass note, etc. Without sophisticated logic, the only real choice short of a hard key split and different tones, etc, is to have all OSCs voiced the same and if you could take 3 voices (6 OSC output) into the 'master' Phatty input, it would be handy to have it processed by the same filter envs, etc.

I'm just rambling here, hopefully this makes sense.

EMwhite wrote:
Without sophisticated logic, the only real choice short of a hard key split and different tones, etc, is to have all OSCs voiced the same and if you could take 3 voices (6 OSC output) into the 'master' Phatty input, it would be handy to have it processed by the same filter envs, etc.

I'm just rambling here, hopefully this makes sense.

So if your concerned with all of the voices being processed by 1 filter simultaneously... why don't you just polychain the with midi and control it with a LP stage 2? You'd be able to control all the parameters of the SP with the LP's controls, meaning you can change all the filter settings on all the devices simultaneously with the LP... Since they all have the same filter, I'd think it would be close to the same thing?

you should be able to do paraphonic (as some call it), poly source with a single filter and filter env by having all the LPs have the same patch except on the slaved LPs have the filter wide open with no env then mix and send the audio out of the slaved LPs back through the audio in of the master where the filter is set to the desired cutoff and env.

Not sure if it will work, but I think it should. I guess the sustain length of the filter env would depend of the 1st key hit though. I can't think of how to get around that.

What about using an MF101 on the audio out?

To truely pull it off, I guess there would need to be a mode it the OS where there filter env of the master would sustain as long as any note is held while routing the audi back through it.

Hi guys,

I should know this but I've been busy with other stuff (like the Slim) and this is the first I've heard about problems with Poly on the Taurus. Can either of you guys provide more detail about what doesn't work properly? In theory it should be running the same poly code as the LP, so it's odd that it doesn't work the same. Post here or email me at amos at moogmusic dot com... thanks!