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Arpeggiated sounds and syncing
I feel really stupid asking this but it’s something I always wondered about. I’m used to physically playimg arpeggios on a piano but haven’t ever used them in synths (I’m onky just getting round to make music again and wasn’t an electronic musician before). I always used to wonder how they play in time with the beat and track. Is it just that they naturally sync as an option in the app with the bpm in daw? If you played a chord out of time and pulled it back in place in the midi editor would that sync up the arpeggio still?
I thought I’d just ask
Comments
It depends on the arpeggiator. Most arpeggiators sync to the host clock or some internal tempo setting. What an arpeggiator does is play held down notes one at a time to turn a block chord into an arpeggio. Most have settings to determine the order in which the notes are played back.
Arpeggiators can vary in how they work. I won't try to cover all the variations.
Some (most?) arpeggiators have the option to play in sync with the host, or to play freely. In the case of a synced arpeggiator even a chord played out of time would fall into sync. This can be disorienting on the first note as it might not play right away if you played after a natural division. So, lets say you had a quarter note arp and you played the chord a little after the beat, you might not hear that first note until the next quarter note division comes around. In this case, moving the chord back to the right timing would have the effect of moving the whole sequence back a quarter note.
A non host synced arpeggiator will have it's own tempo setting. It'll generally start playing that late chord immediately and all the following notes will be off from the host tempo by the same amount. Moving that chord back in line in a midi editor would fix the sync. There can be drift though with a non synced arpeggiator over time though since there's no guarantee the timing will stay in step with the host.
Thanks. I’ve always felt weird about them because when the arpeggio is set very fast, it feels like you have to play exactly in time to a degree that isn’t normal. I mean more for when you lift your hand at the end of one chord to transition to another, I always thought how I’m earth are you meant to do that without cutting off at least one of the arpeggiated notes from the end ofthe first chord (sometimes starting the next partway through the arpeggio depending on mode I suppose) I was a bit embarassed asking as it sounds kind of dumb and no one ever mentions it.
Yes.
And what @wim said.
I don’t usually play the chords when sequencing arpeggios, but instead I mostly draw trigger notes in the MIDI note editor. Mostly.
That’s a good question. It’s not one to be embarrassed about at all.
As you can see it’s not an easy one to answer either. Arpeggiator behavior is one of those things that varies a lot from app to app.
Even more so when you get into hardware synths like Blofeld and Hydrasynth with programmable arpeggiators that are basically sequencers but not fully lol. Some apps on iOS get that deep too. StepPolyArp being the obvious one.
Thanks.
yeah I kind of thought there must be a lot of midi sequencing rather than playing happening when it’s very exact but then you watch people live or bands on YouTube and wonder. Mind you I was up late watching Can last night and even with old tape machine tech some of it was amazing the playing
Or maybe there’s a thing where you can hit the chord before the transition and it will change if it’s in 4/4 mode or something or like it’s programmed to have a half or quarter bar window for you to instruct it what it’ll go to next - that would work quite well I think (depending on song)?
Not to make this discussion more complex, but it can be hard to discern from casual observation, at least speaking for myself, if a musician on video is playing and triggering an arpeggiator or playing a note of a synth patch that is arpeggiated in the patch (LFO modulations, etc.). Sometimes you just know a given synth doesn’t have an onboard arpeggiator, which means possibly an external arpeggiator or some modulating in the patch.
Also in the video, a musician may just be faking it. I know I would.