First impressions, bugs, frustrations...

[mobith]

Hello, sorry you are experiencing that frustration. We made The NDLR for jamming, and not really focussed on composing for musicians. When trying to force The NDLR into very specific repeatable scenarios I can see where it could get tedious. Let me try to address your issues one by one, where I can.

1. Motif1 MIDI out failure: 
There was a bug in the FW that would cause corruption to the motif parameters after doing a 'Factory Reset' from the boot menu. This is fixed in the latest beta (1.1.019). You will need to install that FW and do another factory reset. A workaround is to load Preset "0", edit it if desired, and save it into the other preset slots.

2. General repeatability issues
Please note, we fixed a problem with syncing motifs on "Start All" in an earlier FW release. The latest is posted on the Open Beta forum.
We have been looking at feedback on how people would like the parts to behave with Start/Stop/Continue messages. We currently do nothing with Start, as we wouldn't know which parts to start. The other thing we are looking as it Stop/reset vs Pause. Currently, the motifs pause when you press the play/pause button, so they start where you paused them, but rhythm always resets. If you press the "Play All" button to stop, the motifs will reset to the beginning of their patterns along with the rhythms.
Can you expand on this idea? "Suggestion: Each motif should have a reset on note-on msg for either the pattern or the rhythm or both." Are you trying to slave The NDLR to another sequencer, so you want it to re-set, re-trigger with incoming notes?

3. MIDI input/transpose etc not working.
Some users have noted that our idea of "transpose" is different than what you might expect having used typical sequencers. The NDLR transpose feature takes notes on a MIDI input, transposes them to the current key/mode then passes them though to your sound module. It does not change The NDLR key. The idea being, you can jam on a keyboard with The NDLR and not press any wrong notes.
If you want to change key, you can modulate the Key parameter which is the same behavior as a common sequencer taking note input to change key. Pressing the Shift key while changing the Tempo/Key/Mode knob will prevent  it from changing until the Shift key is released.

4. It doesn't behave like a normal arpeggiator - feature request.
Yes, its definitely not a typical arpeggiator. An early design goal was to make something that you can't already get in many other devices. Having The NDLR act as a common arpeggiator was never on the feature list. However, we have considered some way to get an analogous feature while still maintaining the note constraints that keeps everything in key. The motifs play notes from a note pool based on The NDLR key, mode, chord, chord type and pattern type. One thought was to enable using a keyboard to enter patterns in real time. Currently, you can set patterns to use The NDLR's current "chord notes", "scale notes", or "chromatic". By mapping MIDI notes to pattern step values we could get real time arps based on your keyboard input. For those who play the keys, using "chromatic" mode will let you get out of the note pool box. We don't play the keyboard, which is why we created The NDLR   and we don't use chromatic mode because it would sound like hell 

5. Unstable settings

Agree some of the knobs are too sensitive. We have scaled them and put a "dead space" in to prevent accidental changes, but we plan to do more tweaking on the sensitivity. 
We did pack a lot of info into the subscreens which changes from function to function. Originally we had a great big number in there, which is common on many devices, but we also found it to be meaningless.
Good suggestions.


6. Yes, limited patch memories is unfortunate. We planned to use leftover flash memory as parameter storage, but the platform we developed The NDLR on did not enable us to access that memory. We thought we could overcome it, but so far we have not. We might have a workaround in the future, but can't promise it. 

7. Agree the combined global and patch setting could be cumbersome in the studio, but it is great for jamming or live performance where you want to real time change configuration and part parameters. For instance, you can switch synth modules (or timbers) at the same time as parts, modulations, etc. With more storage we would probably have a "global", "patch" and "performance" or song mode to tie them together.

8. Rhythm step mutes
When the step is red, it is a Rest, green is a Tie. The rest causes a note off to be sent. Unless the synth patch has a long decay the note will turn off. Is this what you wanted? The NDLR breaks down an arpeggiator into its core components. This makes for interesting variations not found on normal arpeggiators. However, it is a bit weird to disassociate the rhythm from the pattern. Its a choice we made to get more flexibility. Its not as easy to get reproducibility, but it can be fun which was the goal.

Hey Daryl thanks for the responses!

1. Cool - will do a factory reset.

2. So this is the big one from my point of view, bear with me whilst I try to explain:

The "normal" way to play an arpeggiator would be to hit notes or chords on a keyboard and the arp plays up or down (etc) the scale you hold at a predetermined rhythm (say every sixteenth note, but it could be a euclidean rhythm for example) until you release all the notes, the scale changing if any extra notes are added or removed in the mean time. (See 4).

Releasing the keys at any time and then repressing them typically restarts both the note pattern and the note rhythm from the beginning - it's repeatable in both dimensions and this allows for predictable phrases or grooves when set along side a regular rhythm pattern (disco, techno etc).

Some more advanced arps (well, I know of only one in hardware, Flame Arp) allow you to turn off the note reset - this means each time you press a chord your arp pattern starts on a different note - great! But in this case it retains the rhythm sequence so you don't break your groove - perfect!

So what I think the NDLR needs per Motif is three extra boolean parameters:

i) Rhythm reset on/off - when set to on, the rhythm resets each time a new note/chord comes in (following zero notes being pressed).
ii) Pattern reset on/off - when set to on, the pattern "" "" "" "" "
iii) Motif only plays while note-on (with your current keyboard mode I guess just any note-on/off would switch on/off the motif(s), in the absence of chord inputs, see 4)

Currently the NDLR appears to have all these params set to off, unless I'm missing something.

3. I think a user switch here to change from traditional to fixed-key (current mode) would be great here - switching between in-key and out of key and achieving lovely dissonance is where the music starts! Being always in key gets boring quickly. I understand I could sequence key changes via MIDI CC? I will try that but it looks like a pain to set up compared to just using a normal midi keyboard and note-on msgs.

4. This is the other big one: I hear you on trying to be different - that's good, but it would be good to also cover the normal expected modes of an arpeggiator so the user has all options available to them. See 2.

So any option that allows you to play and hold a sequence of notes on a keyboard to control the notes in the current scale would be great. Un-pressing notes should thus remove them from the scale. e.g. just pressing C would result in only C's being played. Pressing C and D# would result in all arps and chords only containing those notes, etc, etc.

There are probably three states desirable:

i) Current mode, notes playable defined in NDLR and keyboard does your style of transpose

ii) Normal one key transpose mode from a MIDI keyboard (note pattern defined in NDLR)

ii) Note pattern defined solely by keyboard input chord and the order defined by the order of input or the standard order modes (up/down/root/random/etc - see Flame Arp for some cool modes).

5. Better UI context sensitivity is my main issue here. I might try to elaborate in another thread.

6. Cool - maybe a sysex load/save and a simple Juce librarian app would save the day here! (https://juce.com/) I use it extensively at work - can offer some advice on this if you're interested.

7. In the absence of separate global and patch settings, perhaps we could just remove things like clock source from the patch settings altogether as this seems very independent from the actual patches, and it's painful to have to edit all your patches each time you change clock source.

8. What I meant was it would be good to be able to mute and unmute rhythm steps with a single select-push type operation. This would let you play with the rhythm pattern in a non-destructive way so you can fiddle with your groove quickly (helpful with the retriggering options in 2 when defining a groove.)

Cheers!

M