Gate issues on drone

[SynthJamz]

Hi, I'm having issues with the gate on the drone part. All I get are clicking noises if is set to anything but the first note of the measure. When trying to set to 4 beats per measure nothing, unless I use samples instead of synths as it will trigger the samples. I've tried playing with the quantize settings etc. Sometimes it will play a note in a measure but never all four.

[Jesse Johannesen]

Hi, I'm having issues with the gate on the drone part. All I get are clicking noises if is set to anything but the first note of the measure. When trying to set to 4 beats per measure nothing, unless I use samples instead of synths as it will trigger the samples. I've tried playing with the quantize settings etc. Sometimes it will play a note in a measure but never all four.

Hi SynthJamz, 
Let me see if we can figure out what's up. First, can you please tell me a little bit more about your setup. I would like to know what is hooked up to what, and how. If NDRL is controlling software synths, are they in a DAW? What firmware version are you running? Have you tried adjusting the envelopes on the synth in question, lower attack time, raise decay and release time, etc? 

Jesse

[SynthJamz]

Hi, I'm having issues with the gate on the drone part. All I get are clicking noises if is set to anything but the first note of the measure. When trying to set to 4 beats per measure nothing, unless I use samples instead of synths as it will trigger the samples. I've tried playing with the quantize settings etc. Sometimes it will play a note in a measure but never all four.

Hi SynthJamz, 
Let me see if we can figure out what's up. First, can you please tell me a little bit more about your setup. I would like to know what is hooked up to what, and how. If NDRL is controlling software synths, are they in a DAW? What firmware version are you running? Have you tried adjusting the envelopes on the synth in question, lower attack time, raise decay and release time, etc? 

Jesse

With this particular issue it is with soft synths. Specifically, the three plugin synths that are in the MPC One. My first thought was that there may have been slow attack settings. I adjusted those to the minimum and still had issues. When I set the channel to a motif or pad the notes play normally. I was able to use a multi sample electric bass and that worked as I would expect. If I set the drone to only play the first note of the measure it will play once when I press a chord button, but will not repeat, and no other rhythms seem to be working at all (unless I use samples instead of synth). I have not tried running a hardware synth with it yet, so I can't speak to whether or not that works. I thought that maybe the envelope was not re-triggering, but I do hear clicks on the beats so I thought maybe the note off is coming too quickly, but even with release all the way up I'm still just getting clicks and sometimes a random note. I've tried adjusting octaves as well, and turned off all LFOs.

[Jesse Johannesen]

That's really frustrating, I'm sorry. I can't get the drone part to do anything wrong on my end by changing any of the variables. I had a lot of buggy MIDI behavior with my MPC Live trying to get it to work with different devices as well. I wonder if this might be a similar situation. There are 2 things I would try, first slow down the tempo to a crawl, and see if that has any effect, second is while playing slow, try recording the Drone part to a midi track and see what the note data that gets saved looks like. that may be quite telling as to how it's being interpreted, and may shine light on what is actually the issue we need to fix.

I would also try reaching out to AKAI for support on this issue as well, as they may be in a better position to provide helpful advice than I am. If you have access to a PC you can download the free software MIDIox, which will allow you to monitor MIDI data real time, and you can see the note on/off messages sent and confirm they're all occurring etc.

Is there another MIDI device you can try and use with the MPC One to try and sequence a similar pattern? A keystep or something? It would be good to see if one does work and the other doesn't. If you can record the MIDI in from that as well so you can compare the notes that are saved.

Let me know if any of this turns up something interesting.
Jesse

[SynthJamz]

Thanks, I'll try that out and report back.