[sdiy] Synth UI [was: Modular - sound or song]

[Rainer Buchty]

On Thu, 9 Apr 2009, Seb Francis wrote:

> I do agree that having a physical knob to control every parameter of a sound 
> can be great, but to control what is possible in digital with physical knobs 
> very quickly gets to the point where many parameters have to share the same 
> knob,

...or you end up with something like the Jellinghaus DX7 programmer.

I would say the truth lies in between. Direct access, yes, but only to a 
certain extent. From a certain number of parameters on there's no need 
to make them *all* directly accessible, but you better cluster them in 
groups, i.e. make the *menus* directly accessible, then within the 
selected menu all parameters.

> But actually there are so many more ways that a synth UI can be 
> implemented in computer based software.

What any computer-GUI suffers is the fact that it is usually only 
operable with a mouse. A single point-and-click device which forces to 
into some sort of mouse shuffle. Hence, I have a feeling that the 
concept of synth software plus USB-based external control is something 
we'll see more often in the future.

Rainer