First and foremost I don’t own a Polypulse yet, but I’m very intrigued by the concept, design and sounds coming out of it. I’m an electronic musician and vocalist. Combining both in one box would be great. Therefore I’m very curious about the microphone inputs and how it works with the other functions of the Polypulse. Can you for example record a vocal take while the Polypulse is running, so that you’re hearing what you’re singing to or is it a separate sample menu? I can’t find any documentation or videos about the process of sampling or how the microphone inputs work within the Polypulse operating system.
As there is not a typical sequencer, how can you place for example a 30 second vocal take in a way that syncs to the note list / pulses?
I’d really appreciate any insights from current Polypulse owners or anyone familiar with the workflow.
You can make recordings (internally or from the audio inputs) while the clock is running.
See here on how to start recording audio. While recording is running you can exit the sample menu and continue doing other stuff with the PolyPulse, then to come back later to stop recording and to load the recorded sample into a list.
In the recording menu there is no option to listen what you are recording. However, you can setup two routings:
route the mic input to a track’s audio effects. Could be nice if you want put live mic input and recorded samples of singing through the same audio effects chain.
route the mic input to the output/main audio effects chain.
Enabling / disabling these routings require a few button clicks: open menu → scroll to routing → change it → close menu.
You can play recorded samples using a few different sound engines. Pick a sound engine, select the sample list that contains only your recorded sample and trigger a note once in a while using the sequencer. The amplitude envelope parameters (attack / hold / decay) have a maximum value of 60 seconds, so recordings longer than that will cut off or start fading out at 60 seconds if you set the hold time to the maximum value.
There is not really a workflow currently that is similar to what is usually called a “looper” where you can sing/play a bit and then have it repeated the next bar or delete it.
Currently sampling works like this:
record sample (to the file storage)
load sample (from file storage)
put it in a sample list
use the sample list
This means there is some time / button pressing between singing and playing back recorded singing. If you’re performing live with the PolyPulse this might be too slow of a process depending on what you want to achieve. Specifically if your using the granular engine with very long recordings the recordings needs to be analyzed first before they can be granulized. Analysis is started automatically in the background once the sample is loaded, and 1 minute of sample can take 5-10 seconds of analyzing.
I hope this gives you an idea, but do ask more questions if you have any!
Can all 4 inputs be activate at the same time and freely routed to any of the 5track FX chains? Or freely routed/patched multiple times with an input module?..