Does anyone know how to make Reaktor blocks polyphonic?

Thank you colB

duophonic is actually probably more tricky, because you have to do the voice handling yourself

actually the easiest way to get polyphony with blocks is cut the innards out of the 'instrument' level, and paste everything into a macro. then you can set the voices as desired and combine everything with a voice combiner

blocks are inherently mono, because the ins and outs of the 'instrument' are necessarily mono

oh, yeah using all 128 voices method, that's smart!

i went a different route, using a separate instrument with around five voices.. so like three extra 'buffer' voices such that pressing another note when two were already were held down wouldn't kill the active notes. this necessitated a total spaghetti nightmare downstream, but it did work pretty good in the end

the behavior of mine was somewhat different to yours, as it would ignore any notes pressed after two were already active, IIRC. and i think the priority worked somewhat differently to simple lo/hi, but i believe it pretty well matched the behavior of the arp odyssey vst clone Oddity

Not sure really. It depends how para it is.. so is the envelope shared, or is the gate shared but not the envelope...

I think the 'standard' thing is shared envelope and Gate, in which case it should be as simple as just 'hocketing' the pitch around 4 oscillators, mixing the output and sending that through an envelope driven by a monophonic gate?

I think there are other legit approaches e.g. instead of gates using triggers and AD envelopes. So separate envelope per osc, and because it's trigger driven, those can be hocketed too because we don't need to worry about release times causing notes to overlap with each other.

EDIT: OK, I think I see what you mean. There needs to be at least some per voice switching, so how is that handled so that a voice can be off?

I guess the question then is - What constitutes 'proper paraphony'?

Draw up the rules - even multiple sets of them based on whatever paraphonic vintage or modern systems there are... then it's much easier to understand what can work and what won't

There's no point without a clearly defined set of rules to work towards. Paraphonic has 'problems' by definition. it is a compromise. So before building anything, one would need to make a decision about what version of paraphonic to implement, and then draw up a bunch of rules for that version. Then it will be easier to implement, and also possible to know when it's 'done' :)

Do you know of any sources for detailed info about the behaviour of any vintage paraphonic synths?

Here's another version. This might be cheating ;)

I'm thinking about what EEs might do, and that a poly gate signal could have a 'soft off' like a release on the gate that could be implemented cheaply with maybe just a capacitor and a resistor, so way way cheaper than a complete envelope. Might even be 'free' depending on how the poly gate is implemented? (e.g. a natural consequence of intentionally sloppy switch de-bouncing...?)

So I hacked that in, and some logic that triggers when the mono gate is released. Any poly gates that are active are held. That way you get the release on the envelope, and there is some tolerance to the release time, so it's possible to have chords release if you are precise with your timing. The soft-off thing makes it achievable. Also makes sense in the context of component count in hardware... maybe??

All guessing of course :-)

...I still prefer the duophonic thing that keeps both oscs going all the time, and just brings them to unison when only one key is held. There is a simplicity and elegance to that, and it is very musical. It would be interesting to try and extend that to more voices, although maybe not historically accurate? or maybe it is?