Would be really cool if when you are working with a chopped breakbeat on a single pad, you could assign more than one voice of polyphony to that ‘track’ so that you can play for example kicks snares and hihats on top of eachother within the same track, I suppose this would have to be done via dynamic allocation but could be interesting.
also if there was a was to set the rough placement of sample chops and then press an ‘auto chop’ function which would detect the closest transient to where your 8 samples markers are located. something you could play with and re chop until you are happy with the hits selected. would be a quick and fun way to chop without getting into fine editing (which you could also do later)
I get the whole “staying true to the sp-1200” koolaid, but I am still hopeful the option will be explored to expanded the polyphony a bit (even just for one or two tracks - for playing chords without eating up all the other tracks). It is 2021.
All of that said, there has certainly been a strong trend in the sampler world with recent gear for one voice per track polyphony that I don’t entirely understand (if anyone here can explain the processor/ram/SD card limitations I am actually really interested to hear them).
well as far as I can see the sampler is hardware limited to 8 channels of audio, which is similar to how the original SP works and also similar to the sequential 440 (and rack mount stuff like the S950) the reason why 8 was common back in the day was the cost and size of creating these individual analog voice channels, and 8 seemed to be enough for most things.
But in the case of the 440 it has a software based trick where you can assign channels to dynamically go out available outputs to the mix out which allows for polyphonic playing, the problem is with 8 tracks you will run out polyphony pretty quickly trying to play chords and things like that, but it does net you more sound by squeezing the most out of an 8 channel system.
I get the 8 channel of audio limitation on any gear (new or old) - that is just a channel limitation; I am asking about the polyphony limitations within each channel. Some samplers (old and new) are monophonic within each channel, whereas others are not.
With some newer samplers (such as the octatrack) the amount of processing and the way the samples are streamed from memory are why the limitation is there. Rytm - running samples through an analog filter/env/amp for each channel - makes sense. re: the 440, yeah as you mentioned - acutally running the audio through the analog filters/env etc.
Conversely, the Ensoniq gear - such as EPS 16 plus, ASR-10, ASR-X have a ton of polyphony that can be fairly flexibly routed between channel outs. Digital filters/env. Same with much of the MPC line up.
It seems to me that the s2400, with the digital filters/env ‘as is’ should be capable in theory of handling more voices (that is, one or more channels with polyphonic functionality). I know, at some point an analog filter board will hopefully be available - and then that limitation would exist (unless of course they do something cool and make a 12 or 16 filter board with dynamic/round robin routing).
The E-mu Emax also has dynamic voice allocation where all voices are shared. And you can also assign a program to use a specific range of voices , for example voice 1-6 for a 6 voice polyphonic program and then have voice 7 & 8 shared between other monophonic parts.
I think a slick way do deal with polyphony would be to allow users to select if they want stereo sampling or not, Im my case Im happy with mono sampling which could possibly equal 16 voices instead of 8x2 stereo voices. or even better would be a way to mix and match, say you were happy with 2 stereo voices that would leave you 12 mono etc.