Not so synced

I'm afraid there is far too much that I don't understand about FM8, so could someone please explain something that's mystifying me about one of the standard presets?

It's one of the sequenced sounds called Abfahrer ... It's a great pulsing sound that I've been trying to play with. The problem is that the sound, which according to all the settings I can see should stay sync locked to the host tempo, slowly drifts, with the pulses slowing down, or at least syncing to a slower tempo.

Am I misreading this preset? Is it not meant to stay tempo locked? Have I said something to offend it? And can I get it to behave itself?

Any help gratefully received

 

I'm not seeing that; I think what you're hearing is the spread in the envelopes with how the patch is programmed. Anybody else seeing this?

ew

 

I think I know what you mean EW, but I don't think that quite accounts for what I'm hearing. The entire 'system' of the sound appears to either slow down over time OR is on a marginally slower tempo than it's meant to be (God knows how that would be possible!). The drift takes some time to be really obvious, but by 32 bars in, it's very pronounced.

However, maybe you're right. Maybe the build of the sound means that it simply accumulates artefact echoes that aren't tempo-locked and can simply cause the apparent tempo to 'sag' over time ... I don't know. Maybe someone else has a clue.

Cheers

 

I'm hearing the same issue. I'm running FM8 in Ableton Live 8 (PC), the preset is Compu Gruv. To test this, I put in midi data starting the sound on a down-beat, turned on the click track, put a portion on loop (where it wouldn't restart the sound; just continue it), and then waited. Over the course of time, the groove would fall behind. All the envelopes have Tempo Sync turned on.

Any ideas?

 

Cheers Scott. There may be some logical explanation, but I'm afraid it eludes me.

I'm not sure if the preset designers tune into these threads, but I'd love it if someone could shed some light on the problem.

 

It really makes using grooves unusable. I'm surprised there isn't more mention of this. I could prevent this issue by restarting the loop via MIDI every time one groove ends but, if there is a particularly fast attack to the groove, it spoils the flow.

It doesn't appear to be a sound design issue but, possibly, an internal clock issue (?).

I hope one of the NI guys can take a look at this. I'll open a support ticket if this falls by the way-side.