Documenting the MPC500's polyphony flaws

from the greek:

poly = many
phony = sounds

polyphony refers to how many simultaneous sounds a synth can produce.

a mini moog can only play one note at a time so it is said to be monophonic.

the mpc500 is 32 note polyphonic so that means it can play 32 samples at a time.

on the mpc500 you can set each pad to mono or poly.
in mono mode when you press the pad the first time it plays the sample, but if you press it a second time whilst the sound is still playing then it cuts off the sample and plays it again from the begining.
in poly mode, it continues playing the fisrt note and plays the sucessive note without cutting off the first.

its easy to see that in poly mode you can run out of polyphony pretty fast.

Went thru the motions here with Akai RAM and Third Party Value RAM. No noticeable difference between the two. Made 8 independent drum tracks using one sound per track. Scaled some toms over pitch +2 on the 8th track, added reverb and it went mono. All the samples are mono. Shoudln't have bought that Akai RAM but the resale value just went up. (Not if they read this forum! lmao)

MO7S