I am potentially interested in buying one of the Analog Heat series, mostly for its combination of filter + envelope follower. I also really like that it can ‘skew’ the left and right filters.
The face that it can be used as an audio interface is also useful for my purposes.
I like to extract very ‘thin’ parts of the input audio spectrum for sampling and further manipulation. I’m presuming the HP and LP filters are from 20 to 20k - how thin can the bandwidth of the BP go? How wide can the band stop filter go?
Ideally, there would be an HP and LP in series for more precise bandwidth control - I was thinking of getting an Analog 4 for this reason, but as far as I can tell it doesn’t have any envelope following on the inputs.
You can run the A4 inputs into the voices directly, thereby gaining access to all the internal synthesis functions of the A4 with external sounds, filters/envelopes/LFOs included. There is no envelope follower per se, but you can program an envelope response which follows the input source material with a bit of effort. This onviously isnt a viable solution for varying realtime program material however
Interesting - so basically you can trigger the internal envelopes on the A4, but not follow continuous input.
Might be worth considering a separate envelope follower solution via CV - obviously a bit more convenient to have them both in one place, as on the Heat.
I can’t give you the numbers in Hz, but it’ll be about the same between the Heat and the A4, as presumably they are both controlled at the same digital resolution. Between the two options it mostly comes down to which method you’re more comfortable with. The lack of envelope follower on the A4 can be overcome, but it probably means eurorack or CV tools or other such workarounds.
One thing to note is they the encoders on the MK1 A4 can be a bit of a pain in the arse to dial in just right, the encoders just aren’t as precise and some people really struggle with the way they behave.
You could buy a second hand heat and give it a go, worst case scenario you sell it on for more or less what you paid for it.
Yes, I may end up just buying a used Heat and seeing how I like it. The other thing I was noticing is that the +FX version has some (presumably digital) HP and LP filtering - I was wondering if I could use those with the other effects settings turned down…
Re: the A4 filters I had read somewhere that it was possible to chain them allowing for the filters from each voice to work in series - so I was imagining something like LP>HP>BS>PK for example.
I was wondering if there is some sort of envelope follower pedal that has a CV out maybe, but again, a bit fiddly
Yeah, you can use the A4 as an 8 x filterbank. Very powerful.
The difficulty with triggering the envelopes on the A4 is that they can only be triggered via MIDI, so you’d need to run a stream of MIDI notes into the A4 to trigger the envelopes. So it’s really just a case of either copying what you’re doing into a midi track that you feed into the A4, or you could set something up to send a midi note once a certain threshold is reached.
Filters in the A4 are in series. Filter 1 is a 24 db/oct low pass filter, filter 2 is a multimode filter similar to the one in the Heat. So, yes, you can have lp-hp, lp-lp, lp-bp, lp-bs or lp-pk.
For parallel filtering you send the same input to two or more voices.
A4 also has neighbour tracks, so you can have more than two filters in series, up to 8 filters in series, if you want to, I think. I’ve never tried more than one neighbour track.
For processing the external inputs you’ll have to open the amp envelope (you can simply place a trig on every step). For the filter envelope or the 2nd envelope, you can of course also trigger them by placing trigs. You actually have the choice to trigger or retrigger all envelopes and lfos independently per step.
A4 is very flexible as a filter/fx box and with its macros, stereo filtering or filters on several tracks can easily be controlled. For example you can set up true stereo filtering by routing the left channel of a stereo source through one track on the A4 and the right channel to another and set up macros to have one cutoff knob, one resonance knob, one envelope decay knob etc.
Save that as a kit (or the tracks individually as sounds) and you can also load up a stereo filtering preset.
It’s also possible to have a “stereo spread control” by changing filter cutoff on only left or right (or set up a macro to control just one filter cutoff in the range you want).
Heat is arguably much simpler, basically works out of the box. A4 is much more flexible, but you have to set up everything the way you want it.
As much as I enjoy having a +FX, the MKII is still the number one Heat in my opinion. It lacks the bells and whistles of the +FX, and some of those are useful (the bass mono-fier module being my favourite, along with the noise generator within the warble module) but they are optional extras, which I don’t feel are worth the extra cost. That said, I’ve noticed +FX prices failing to the point where they aren’t that much more expensive than the MKII, in which case, you may as well go for the +FX.
If elektron updated the heat fx with some new blocks like a scientific eq notch filter thing that could surgically modulate specific frequency bands, I’d shit my pants.
Btw, to highlight the A4’s flexibility, it’s possible to have classic EQ functionality with low pass, notch, 2x peak filter and high pass filter. For the multimode filter we even have the choice between 2 pole and 1 pole 6 db/oct filters.
Or we could set it up as a stereo filter box with modulation and fx, parallel or serial filter…this little box is pretty crazy.
