I’ve been eyeing the A4 MKII lately, particularly for use as a drum synth. Had an excellent jam with it at a friend’s house recently and found it a lot more satisfying for drums than the AR, which I had for a while before selling. When synthesizing kicks, I was mostly using the triangle waveform and fine tuning with the filters, which sounded fantastic, but i couldn’t manage to create satisfying filter envelope kicks (i.e. without using the oscillators) like I can on my Pulse 2, which allows me to get cleaner sine/808-style kicks. This raised a couple of curiosities that A4 MKII users/filter experts might be able to shed some light on.
First, I noticed that the ladder filter doesn’t self oscillate nearly as strongly or consistently as the multimode filter. This seems to make it unsuitable for filter kicks, which is a bit of a shame as it would be lovely to be able to do this and then further tailor the kick with the multimode filter thereafter. I’ve never had a piece of gear with a ladder filter; is this weak self-oscillation a trait inherent to ladder filters in particular? I don’t have access to the unit anymore, so do any A4 MKII owners know if using the oscillator feedback function would allow the ladder filter to self oscillate enough for synthesizing smooth siney kicks? The multimode filter didn’t show much promise for filter kicks either, particularly since the overdrive comes before it in the signal chain and doesn’t allow me to get the emphasis I need without having to neighbor to the next track.
Unless I just need to spend more time getting to know the A4’s filters and their envelopes, I assume the CV-output-to-external-input trick is probably the only way to get a good sine kick out of it, which is probably preferable in the long run since it doesn’t eat up any track space. In short, do any A4 MKII owners have much experience using the filters for this purpose?