[sdiy] dave smith *instruments*

[cheater cheater]

The reason why people requested the pot edition is because encoders
are completely crap for anyone who does music as more than a hobby.
Anywhere you see musicians they are trying to learn their instrument
and how it works and how best to operate it, and get better at it by
developing muscle memory which is a way of operating your instruments
through subconscious reflexes. This is not different with electronic
instruments and hardware that processes sound.

Encoders completely disable positional muscle memory (i.e. the sound i
want was halfway down the string / the knob was on 1 o'clock) as well
as movement muscle memory (i.e. i have to turn it right by 90 degrees
to get my sound). This can be compared to the frets on a guitar
changing places as you're dragging your fingers down the strings.

It is especially annoying when the encoders don't do what they're
supposed to because they glitch out: either because the gray code was
completely corrupted and the encoder suddenly jumps to a random value,
or because we skipped 'just one value' like Antti mentions. This
skipping is quite aggravating and feels as if the encoder was greased
up and you can't turn it properly, especially if it happens in
sequence, i.e. multiple times during one movement of the knob.

I truly cannot come up with an idea of where in a musical studio
encoders are a good idea. Maybe alpha dials to move through menus
quickly. But for editing values?

On a musical instrument you want to be able to change the sound to
what you have in your head quickly, and you get there by remembering
how the knobs were set up and how they were positioned. This is the
whole function of the user interface of a synth. We are of course not
talking here about people who are on a  'sound journey' and are
'discovering sound spaces' i.e. have no idea what a knob does and turn
it and listen to what it changes - those people use the confusion of
an encoder in their own way, but I assure they will be equally
confused with potentiometers.

It's even worse on a performance instrument where the knobs are your
performance tools. In that case you might want to, for example,
rhythmically move a knob and the crappiness of encoders completely
disables this.

So let's look at consoles: useful or not? Some people like the icon
and stuff like that. Maybe it's done well, I can't argue without
having ever used it. But I know one thing for sure - if you're in a
recording studio, you want to get to places quick, and you do this by,
again, using muscle memory for what you are doing, when setting up
reverb send levels, when setting up the EQ for the vocal and rhythm
guitar, and so on. The icon has presets so it does away with the
aggravation of using encoders for that, but I am certain that using
silly bouncing encoders that skip over values to set up from scratch a
whole 24 channel board of knobs one by one is a bad experience.
Similar applies to outboard gear which is used in the same way.

You might want to argue 'oh, but you need to be able to recall patches
and stuff and you cannot do that with normal potentiometers' to which
I can only tell you to learn a bit more about programming and hint you
on a term called 'parallax mode'.


-----


> Reminds me of a German computer mag in the 1980s, where they applied all
> kinds of endurance tests to joysticks like lassoing, bathing them in coke,
> fall tests from 1m and 2m heights, etc. Failing these tests resulted in
> deductions on usability grades as they didn't withstand "typical" accidents.

I remember similar things! I think no laptop withstood the 'tile floor
fall from a desk', but carpeted floors definitely scored higher. I
can't remember if I was reading a PC mag or a home improvement catalog
:D

D.

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 08:37, David G. Dixon <dixon at interchange.ubc.ca> wrote:
>
>> Sorry I forgot to mention that there are also optical encoders from
>> grayhill and other companies.
>> They cost about twice compared to the mechanical version but may work
>> longer...
>
> That crappy old Farfisa organ I tore apart for its keyboards had an optical
> encoder volume pedal.  Maybe someone can replace all the knobs on their Dave
> Smith synth with volume pedals from 30-year-old Farfisa organs!
>
> (Go analog!)
>
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