Poly-chain: cool, or a dead end?

[SynthWizard]

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Poly-chain: cool, or a dead end?

KORG calls it poly-chain, and I've seen other manufacturers call it 'MIDI overflow'. The idea is that you can add a 2nd synth, identical to the first, and expand the number of voices available by interconnecting them with a single MIDI cable. They will take up double the amount of mixer/interface inputs though.

My personal experience with this is from the Minilogue XD, which is 4 voice polyphonic. I bought a 2nd one and poly-chained them, to make a single 8 voice synth. Upon using it, I've found that the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. Basically, you need both synths to be mirror copies of each other, in terms of the saved patches, user osc and effects memory slots, etc. Because changing patches from the master synth just sends the signal 'change to memory slot #xxx', so if you have different patches saved to those memory slots, the results will be very weird indeed (which could be fun if done on purpose, but it isn't really very practical in a musical sense). The other aspect I find disappointing is that all the surface controls (knobs etc) on the secondary synth are fully disabled, so you don't get double the control surface. Though I suppose this makes sense, I think it would be more interesting if you could use that second control surface for something, even if it was just a MIDI controller for some other synth.

I've looked at the Modal Skulpt, which is a 4 voice VA synth, and it can also poly chain up to 8 voices. But I think it will have all the same limitations I described above. At least it is a lot cheaper...

So my experience is that poly-chain looks good on paper, but in practice it isn't all that great. Are there synths that do this poly-chain thing really well? Or is this a dead-end of synth development?

I also think it would be super interesting if there was some universal poly-chain standard that would allow you to connect synths from different manufacturers, but AFAIK that doesn't exist (yet).

submitted by /u/minimal-camera
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