How to disable the set method of a class

Hello,

Is it possible to temporarily disable a set method defined within a class?

For example, say I am communicating with an external instrument. To make this easier, I would like to have a class that handles all the communication code for me. This is an example of the class:

classdef InstrumentCommunicatorinator
  properties
      sample_length = 1e6;
  end
  methods
      function obj = set.sample_length(obj,value)
          obj.sample_length = value;
          % Lines of code to set sample_length value on external instrument
      end
  end
end

This works well. Now when I set

InstrumentCommunicatorinator.sample_length = 100;

both my class and my instrument will by in sync, and have a sample length of 100.

However, say I want to make a bunch of settings by hand on the instrument, and transfer these settings FROM the instrument TO the InstrumentCommunicatorinator class. This is a case of when I want to assign values but NOT use the set function I defined. Is it possible to temporarily disable the set method in a class? Or is there a better way of doing this?

Thanks for the help!