Hi everyone
I tried polyphony with plaits clone and the signal gets too hot and distorted when I play 3 notes at the same time (even worse with 4 notes)
I guess each note outputs a level that gets summed with polyphony
Is it specific to plaits? (Didn’t try other VCO and I’m away right now)
Is there a way to stay “in the cool zone” without adding a module? Thing is, if I add a module the level would be different if I play 1 note or 4 notes..
thanks for your help !
If there’s no level control on the sound source (plaits or any other) then poly out from sound source to a split module than to a four channels mixer. So you can have control over gain staging.
Or more simple. Poly out from sound source through an attenuation (like a manually and CV controlled vca than carries poly cables) like this one. VCV Library - Bogaudio VCAMP
Q. can you attenuate on a single channel? (i.e after auto sum)
I thought vcv allows signals to go beyond ±1 (*) its only at the output stage that this will ‘distort’, so basically you can gain stage at end of chain.
(*) or ±10v if you wish to think in these terms.
that said.. if you feed hot signal into other modules (e.g. an FX), they may not be designed to operate outside the normal range, so this can cause artefacts and clippping.
reverbs are a good example where this can get really bad / nasty 
beyond that, Id say considering using a compressor rather than a simple attenuator.
the issue I often face with simple attenuation, is if you attenuate for 4 voices, playing 1 voice will be often very quiet - so its fine, if you are always playing N voices (e.g. 3 note chords).
using compression (fiddle with settings, like makeup gain etc) means it can even things out regardless of number of voices played.
the trade off is you do loose dynamic range.
that said, I still do use attenuators often, they are simple and cheap (cpu) and often are enough.
Thank you very much @deniSound @TheTechnobear 
It makes perfect sense