Choke and Voice Assign

Each of a Beat’s thirty-two Sounds can be choked by one of two other Sounds in the Beat. The most obvious use is to enable a pedaled or closed hihat to choke off an open hihat.

To Set Choke for a Sound:

1) In 16 Sounds pad mode and Sounds edit mode, use the Page Down or key to navigate to the Misc screen.

2) Tap any pad to select a Sound.

3) Use the Choke 1 Soft Knob to choose the Sound/pad that will choke the selected Sound. If desired, use Choke 2 to specify a second choke Sound/pad.

Voice Assign restricts a Sound to playing on only one of Tempest’s six voices. By default, Tempest uses dynamic voice allocation. That is, if a voice is already occupied with playing a Sound, new notes will play on the next available voice. When all six voices are in use, new notes will steal a voice from one of the Sounds already playing, causing that Sound to be cut off. Assigning a Sound to a specific voice guarantees that voice won’t be stolen, at least not by the remaining dynamically allocated voices. Multiple Sounds can be assigned to a single voice and will still steal the voice when two or more notes play simultaneously.

Again, using a hihat as an example, assigning the different hihat articulations to a single voice will guarantee that the hihat will always sound and its voice will not be stolen. If a Beat has a steady 8th- or 16th-note pattern, it will be pretty obvious if the hihat’s voice is stolen, even for one note.

Be aware, though, that some Sounds —particularly Sounds with longer decays like crash or ride cymbals — can benefit from the voices being dynamically allocated. These Sounds tend to sound better or, at least, more realistic, if they’re allowed to overlap and not be cut off by voice stealing, so it may take some planning and tweaking to achieve a good balance between Sounds assigned to specific voices and Sounds that use the remaining pool of dynamically allocated voices.

Voice Assign also assigns a Sound to a specific voice output. For example, if the kick drum is assigned to voice 1, the kick drum will be available for separate processing via the Voice 1 jack on the rear panel. Inserting a plug in one of the individual voice output jacks removes that voice from the main outputs. The voice output jacks are stereo, and so retain any pan settings.