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This is a Polyend SEQ. It is beautiful, with "a glass-sanded anodized aluminum front panel, knobs, bottom plates, and handcrafted oak wooden case."

The second diagram illustrates the first sign of weirdness: a hum that I thought was just probably a ground loop. I use a multiclock, a multi-output clock device that promises MIDI sync stability with +/-1 sample of jitter (and compensation knobs). The multiclock takes in a special audio signal from the DAW (via an SSL usb interface) that provides it with synchronization info (since as we all know, MIDI sync implementations are terribly inconsistent) and provides the midi out signals to multiple devices. When the midi clock is plugged in to the audio and power, I get a hum... even if the audio source isn't getting any power. Both are going to the same wall outlet so I chocked it up to that.

I want to use this thing primarily to sequence drums, but the default root notes don't start on the same note as most of my plugins and devices. So I was going to dump a few SEQ presets and try and pick apart how they're put together in order to program this thing with some defaults (and I did a little, looks like it's simple groupings of hex per track per pattern...) but then--- I noticed a neat little feature in the SEQ manual.

There’s also one more cool trick you can perform! Hold one or more track buttons and send a MIDI note from external gear to change the root key of an existing sequence of notes. You can do this “on the fly”, there's no need of stopping playback. The interesting fact of using this is that it turns Seq into some kind of a polyphonic arpeggiator, as you can change the root notes for the separate tracks while they’re on the run!

So I set the SEQ as an output device. I used my Push 2 to punch in a few root notes, and at first there was some ghosting, I realized it was going into a wild i/o loop because the push triggered the SEQ triggered the SEQ triggered the SEQ, but then I disabled the seq as an input it worked, the note input showed up on the display, and when I held a button down it would show the changed note. So far so good. Then I swapped the SEQ from output to input and tried to punch in stuff, and nothing-- the notes all disappeared. I did a bunch of troubleshooting, I could get clock devices in, but a ton of the patterns were just not functioning. I even tried not using USB and sending MIDI through the interface-- my computer just wasn't receiving any note data at all. Did I fry the MIDI function on this? Was I going to have to do a firmware upgrade? Why was there no factory reset function??

Eventually I switched it to like, pattern 8-32 (the last one) and I was able to get working output. So I copied that pattern to 1-1, 1-2, etc. and it worked! So the MIDI is still functional but now I'm back to the original problem: I need to copy some defaults over to a ton of the patterns on this device to even make it output midi at all. might be here a while


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