The polyphonic blocks feature special polyphonic ports denoted by a light grey circle around the edge of the port.
Polyphonic output ports can be connected to monophonic input ports and vice versa. There are also various utility 'Voice' blocks to convert polyphonic output signals to individual monophonic signals for each voice or to modulate the individual voices etc.
Monophonic output ports can be connected to polyphonic input ports, you can for example connect a monophonic signal from the regular (non-polyphonic) Mini Oscillator block to the polyphonic 'A/B' modulation input ports of the Polyphonic Filter block to modulate all 5 voices simultaneously.
All polyphonic blocks are set to 5 voice polyphony by default (if required this can be changed for each block using 'Voices' setting in the inspector when the blocks are loaded in ensemble mode).
Most of the polyphonic oscillator blocks have an AMP (VCA - voltage controlled amplifier) port that controls the volume of the voices. This port also switches off processing of the voices when the value is zero, therefore you can save some CPU power by using these ports (by connecting an envelope or gate signal to it).
For convenience the A/B modulation sliders on all of the polyphonic versions of the blocks are hard-wired to 2 internal voice spreader circuits, which can be used to apply some spreading to the control's value across the 5 internal voices. Modulation Bus A is wired to a uni-directional spreader and Modulation Bus B is wired to a bi-directional spreader.
In the cheatsheet below you can see RELEASE knob of the envelope block has modulation applied using the 'B' modulation slider, the 'B' modulation input port is not connected to anything therefore the voice spreader circuit is applied to that control instead. You can see this 'spread-out' modulation by looking at the little triangle-shaped modulation indicators around the RELEASE knob. In this cheatsheet the GAIN control of the 'Polyphonic Waveshaper' block is being modulated by the 'Voice Spread' block in a similar way. The 'Voice Spread' block is doing the same thing as the 'Envelope' block's built-in voice spreader circuit, the advantage of using an external block to do this is that you have more flexibility to modulate the amount of spreading and you can use the 'Voice Spread' block's snapshots. The 'Nano' blocks (small black blocks) don't have the built-in voice spreader circuit so the 'Voice Spread' block is useful to spread the voices on these blocks.
You can use the built-in voice spreader circuit to create a detuned 'unison' sound using the 'Tangle Oscillator (Polyphonic)' block like this: first connect the block to Reaktor's output and set the shape to SAWTOOTH, with nothing connected to the B modulation bus port (so that the bi-directional spreader is used instead), you can increase to the B modulation amount slider (click on the 'B' button to show it) to begin spreading out the tuning of the 5 voices for a thick, 'unison' type sound. As you increase the modulation slider you will see the 5 modulation indicator triangles spread out around the control indicating the fine tune position of the 5 individual voices.
The modulation indicators around the knobs of the blocks will show the current modulation values for each voice. Other parts of the user interface, for example sample waveform and filter displays will only show the display for the most recently played voice. Sometimes these displays can get out of sync with incoming MIDI notes, if this happens just save and re-open the rack, and the displays will be correctly synchronized with the incoming MIDI notes.
The versions of the blocks with "CR" in their name run at the slower 'Control Rate' internal clock rather than at the 'Audio Rate' clock, you can use these blocks in combination with the polyphonic modulation blocks rather than the regular audio rate versions to save CPU in larger polyphonic racks. You can set the control rate frequency using the 'Control Rate' sub-menu in Reaktor's 'Settings' menu (default is 400Hz, you can change it to 1600 for better timing performance of the polyphonic modulators and sequencers with very little increase in CPU usage). Note: as the CR versions of the blocks run internally at the slower control rate clock you can not pass audio signals through these blocks, they are designed for modulation signals like LFOs etc.
The group of blocks starting with "Voice" can be used to modulate, spread, route or mute the individual polyphonic voices.
The cheatsheet below shows how to hook up a typical polyphonic synth rack using the polyphonic blocks:
