Multitimbrality limited to 2 parts?

janogarcia · Post by **janogarcia** » Sat Jul 14, 2012 8:35 am

Hi Jesse, I absolutely LOVE the sound of ThumbJam instruments. In my opinion they are much superior than those of SampleTank for iOS, or equally good as GarabeBand for iOS... just to name a few.

Lately I've been experimenting with ThumbJam + Genome MIDI Sequencer/BeatMaker 2/SunVox/StepPolyArp...

I was IMPRESSED when I discovered that I could sequence up to 2 different instruments via Virtual MIDI. My question is:

Can I load or sequence more than 2 instruments/parts? Let's say 4 parts as in SampleTank for iOS, would it be possible?. If not, what is the limit of TJ multitimbral ability, 2 instruments/parts? In that case is it planned to increase that number? That would be JUST AMAZING!

Thanks!

Post by **Jesse** » Sat Jul 14, 2012 2:07 pm

Yes, 2 is currently the limit. It could be increased to 4 without technical issues, especially on newer hardware. It would just need some minor updated UI design to accommodate it. Thanks for the feature request!

janogarcia · Post by **janogarcia** » Sat Jul 14, 2012 3:28 pm

That sounds great! Looking forward to it!

Thank you for the fast support Jesse!

marlow77 · Post by **marlow77** » Mon Jul 16, 2012 1:02 pm

janogarcia,

You could do a workaround for this very easily with your own samples. You could simply do something like the following:

C-2 - C2 Cello (4 octaves)
C2 - C6 Guitar (4 octaves)
C6 - C10 Bass (4 octaves)
C10 - C12 Drums (2 octaves) <--you probably wouldn't even need 2 here

And quite honestly, you wouldn't need 4 octaves of each instrument. Most instruments would be quite playable with two or three.

In Genome you could simply use those octaves that coincide with the sample sets you have in TJ.

Theoretically, if you only had 1 octave per instrument you could play 12 octaves (depending on iOS device and file limitations).

Jesse, there aren't any sampleset size limitations are there?

I know I made quite a hefty 64MB sample set that was very playable, but I wasn't trying to use other apps in the background at the same time.

Good luck,

Marlow77

Post by **Jesse** » Mon Jul 16, 2012 1:11 pm

There aren't sampleset size limitations, but there are polyphony limitations during usage. The max polyphony limits in the prefs are actually per-instrument.

Also, if janogarcia wanted to use some native TJ instrument samples, you can't easily create a new instrument using some of them.

marlow77 · Post by **marlow77** » Mon Jul 16, 2012 1:56 pm

But the polyphony is up to 24 notes at the same time!

I think that most of the instruments wouldn't need more than 6 note chords at the same time, so it could work.

Of course, I haven't really found any other instrument sets as good as yours, Jesse. So trying to use built-in samples would not apply to this workaround. Seriously, the piano and the cello are truly amazing and expressive.

Regardless, I love the idea of being able to have more instruments playing at the same time, but I was just trying to help janogarcia to find temporary ways of using it now until your release another update. Usually, your updates are unreal and exceptional and take a while to release.

janogarcia · Post by **janogarcia** » Sat Jul 21, 2012 4:44 am

Thank you for the simple workaround! It seems a nice solution when using custom samples, even with the max polyphony limitation. However it will be of little use to me, as I wanted to use the factory samples/instruments.

I hope this feature gets implemented in the near future.

Thanks marlow77 for your help.