If you are holding down a chord, turning ON mute will immediately cut off the sound and all elements for that Part muted will stop consuming polyphony.

If you are holding down a chord, turning OFF keyboard control will not immediately cut off the sound. The elements played and held will keep playing until you lift off the keys.

That's the primary difference. Mute has some situations where it conserves more polyphony.

Keyboard control allows for you to achieve something similar to seamless Performance switching within the context of a single Performance (by "turning on" and "off" Part(s) within your Performance using keyboard control).

I generally use keyboard control these days but used Mute before - because keyboard control was not available through scenes prior to an old firmware update. Which method you use to "turn on" a Part wouldn't have a huge impact on the problem you're facing.

There is no PDF with this documentation. Recently there was discussion that it would be helpful to have such documentation added to the available documentation. I was saying that this thread would be a use case for that non-existent documentation.

@Antony

If you take an "Init Normal (AWM2)" Part 1 and copy element 1 to elements 2-8 so all 8 elements are used and play simultaneously then copy this Part 1 to Parts 2-8 then this sets up a worst case. Play and hold one note - add another while holding - add another. Do this until you see one of the Parts volume go to 0. This is with all Parts unmuted. When you see one Part's volume go to 0 - you know all of those elements were turned off due to exceeding polyphony on AWM2.

Now mute all Parts except for Part 7. Repeat the above. You'll notice that the Part you are playing doesn't cut out like it should if all of the other Parts were really still firing off the elements at a zero volume.

You can experiment around with various other things. Like Mute none and see how many fingers until one entire Part goes silent due to stealing. Now Mute Part 1 (the highest priority Part) and see how many held notes it takes. You'll notice it takes more held notes to start stealing.

Enough of this experimentation should give some notion of what's going on.

I would say that if the "lights" for the elements illuminated while a Part was muted then I would agree that muted Parts consume polyphony. However, I don't see this. The elements for a given Part are not reporting being triggered when Mute is turned on that Part.

Of course we can't say that the Muted parts aren't getting polyphony stolen instead of the unmuted ones (under the assumption that these Parts muted are firing off their elements). However, it doesn't make sense that the priority order would change depending on muting. Part 1 wouldn't get stolen from (first) when unmuted and I doubt this changes when muted.

Can you load the waveform backing track (part 7) into the Song Recorder and play it from there?

Or put it on an iPhone or iPad and pipe it through the Audio In?

@Jason...

I changed "Muted" to "Lowered Volume" because this is in fact what I meant. Case in point... emulated Drawbar "closed".

I made this change almost instantaneously when proof reading my post, and was also surprised to see your post immediately following mine.... we were writing at the same time.

I do not know whether usage of the Mute "button" does or doesn't affect Polyphony, I am willing to accept your proof. I had thought that the only way to stop a Part using Polyphony was to turn Keyboard Control Off, and the only way to stop an Element using Polyphony was to "deactivate" it in the EDIT menus. I had always assumed that using the "Mute" button just lowered the volume to Zero, and therefore continued to use Polyphony.

I do know that the green "Element in use" light (emulated green LED in the touch screen) is broken/bugged, and therefore serves no purpose anymore. This was established a while back, and to me is no "biggy".

OK..so I swapped out ''Full Monty" part 7 with an "FM Rock organ" amd so far it seems to now be working ok.

I've left Jazz 2 organ in because ideally I want that as a layer on top of "FM Rock organ" in my verse 2 (Scene 2)...and so far it seems to be ok polyphony wise...fingers crossed!

So organ wise...scene 1 is has Jazz 2 and scene 2 has both Jazz 2 and FM Rock

When you see one Part's volume go to 0 - you know all of those elements were turned off due to exceeding polyphony on AWM2.

Might just be my ears but I don't see that happening on a Modx. I can lay both arms on the keys and none of the part volumes ever goes to zero even though notes have been cut off.

Now mute all Parts except for Part 7. Repeat the above. You'll notice that the Part you are playing doesn't cut out like it should if all of the other Parts were really still firing off the elements at a zero volume.

I can't reproduce that on the Modx either.

It is my understanding that Muting just prevents a sound from going to the output. That is, that it acts AFTER the tone generator whereas Keyboard Control acts BEFORE the tone generator.

By now, after reading your new replies and tinkering with the run 3 game I feel I have a basic understanding of how it works. Looking forward to experimenting more to see how I can make it all work.Thanks a bunch to all of you!

This post about play snake was a lot of fun to read, despite the fact that it took me a while to read all of the comments that were deleted. It was really helpful to me, and I'm sure it will be to everyone else who comments on this post as well! It's wonderful that you're not just getting information, but also having fun!