This is something I’m running up against, when I merge several monophonic sequencers CV/Gate into a single Polyphonic Cable.
The problem came up in driving a VST Instrument, specifically Kontakt running a sampled piano patch, though I imagine it’s not the only instrument that acts this way:
if you send the same note CV at or near the same time, once it goes through VCV HOST, it seems like a second MIDI Note On on the same note value cuts off the already playing note, so you get unrealistically short notes.
Is there a way to remove duplicate notes from a poly cable? Is this a module idea?
I’ve had this exact same behavior when driving Pianoteq, and the trick is to add a few samples of delay in the gate signal going to Host, such that the pitch CV is stable at or a few samples before the gate event. If for whatever reason the pitch changes a few samples after the gate, for some reason that can cause duplicate notes. So I typically run the gate through a few 8vert knobs (at full) or Mutes, or other. One other thing to try is sample and hold both the pitch and gate with the same clock, if that is possible in your setup. I’ve done that in my last piece and it worked very well. Good luck!
Sorry beforehand if this is not an answer; why not try a proper polyseq? My fav, and very underrated, is polyseq16 by STS. Due his mix of CV, Gates and Triggers is perfect with Terrorform, Palette… With the little help of partner in crime PolyLFO does magic.
PS. Can someone fix the green fourth row (bass line)? Is the only black cloud of this seq.
The point of what I’m doing is that I have different sequencers running at different clock rates, so that you get a changing relationship between note patterns, so using a ‘proper polyseq’ isn’t necessarily a good solution.
This isn’t just a Rack issue - I find that I run into similar weirdness in Ableton Live, where several midi clips target the same VST Instrument. If the notes overlap you get very un-musical retriggers and cutoffs. I solve it in Live by having 4 instances of Kontakt open at the same time, and that seemed a bit much.
I could jam out an arrangement and capture the MIDI somehow, maybe with a loopback MIDI device and then remove duplicates, but that really isn’t how I want things to flow.
I’ve had this exact same behavior when driving Pianoteq, and the trick is to add a few samples of delay in the gate signal going to Host, such that the pitch CV is stable at or a few samples before the pitch change.
Giving this a try, it seems better. Thanks so much for the suggestion!
for the developer considerate fix this in the best way possible