"Hold" limits instrument to polyphony of 1?

Hi there,

I was trying to record drums, so I pushed the “Hold” button, since the popup help says that this will stop recording note-off messages (something you definitely want when recording drums).

However, this setting will also limit the instrument to a polyphony of 1 for some reason. Very annoying, since I cannot record drums now (or is there another way?).

Would be great to see a fix for this asap.

However, this setting will also limit the instrument to a polyphony of 1 for some reason.

Polyphony is not affected by the hold mode. You can hold as many keys as you’d want. Maybe you had different options enabled at the time that would affect this?

But I agree that the description is kind of misleading. Quoting from the Renoise wiki (emphasis mine):

When enabled, Note-Off (key release) messages are ignored and the instrument continues playing. This is incredibly useful for triggering samples from devices that are not traditionally ‘held down’ e.g. drum pads.

Again, this could easily be mis-interpreted as “cool, it’s for finger-drumming”, which is not the case.

Instead, think of ‘Hold’ mode as when you are sitting with a keyboard and want to sustain a certain note indefinitely. Without ‘Hold’, you would have to keep that key depressed for as long as you would have it sounding. As you press the same key multiple times, it toggles between sounding and releasing the note.

And I’ve seen a number of creative solutions to this. Most involved putting small lead weights on the piano keys, but also inserting knives between the keys!!

Thanks for the explanation. I understand the purpose of hold now. It is indeed confusing, though. I suggest to change this misleading description.

I’ve changed the description to say ‘external hardware’ instead of ‘devices’. Beyond that I don’t know how it could be any clearer; the first sentence tells you exactly what it does and the second gives an example of where this is desirable. There’s no reference to changes in polyphony or other note behaviour at all.

Thats the point :slight_smile:
It should state that polyphony of a single note is set to 1.

Polyphony is not affected by the hold mode. You can hold as many keys as you’d want. Maybe you had different options enabled at the time that would affect this?

Strange. On my machine when I play a C4 I can only play the next C4 when the sample assigned to C4 has finished playing…

I see what the issue is now. It behaves differently depending on if the note is triggered live vs. played back via the Pattern Editor. I’ll investigate fully and then update the manual.

OK, when playing/recording notes, instruments using Hold do have polyphony as normal, but you need to press a note a second time to release it (you’ll see the key held down on the keyboard in the Instrument section). Useful for a lot of things, but playing drums isn’t one of them. :wink:
I assumed this behaved like a One-Shot for the entire instrument. My apologies.