[sdiy] Pots vs Encoders, was Re: [sdiy] dave smith *instruments*

[cheater cheater]

Tom,
are you saying people don't change the synth parameters during
performance anymore, because it's not the 70s?

That's what I was talking about.

None of the situations I mentioned allows you to store presets:
- you can't perform on a synth using the parameters as a tool of
expression by just cycling presets
- you can't perform on a synth using the presets as a tool of quickly
accessing the sound you want, unless you're in a playlist band that
uses the exact same sounds over and over and never does anything
original on stage. Of course I'm not talking about this - if you just
want to use the same things over and over you're much better off using
a Kurzweil sampler, they're quite good at this. Miles Davis did not
have playlists for his songs and yet he was able to quickly recall all
the different sounds he made on his instrument.
- you can't directly use presets when mixing. They can only be an
entry point, but they will never work exactly the way you want with
the sounds you have, unless you're a 'loop musician' and are using the
same loops over and over. Every sound and every recording session are
different and require different compressor settings and reverb decays
and what ever else. Even when getting from an 'entry point' provided
by presets, to the exact sound you want, it's much easier to use pots.

If the encoders don't show you anything ever, and pots don't show you
anything only after you've recalled a patch, then pots are not worse
than encoders. But all the above holds which makes pots better in my
opinion.

D.

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 13:10, Tom Wiltshire <tom at electricdruid.net> wrote:
>
> On 2 Feb 2010, at 10:35, cheater cheater wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> Encoders are a solution to the ancient problem of knob positions on a
> programmable instrument. You're completely right that people want to change
> the sound quickly, and they mostly want to do that by patch recall, not by
> setting the knobs up again - that was the 70s, man. And in the 70s people
> responded by having a stack of keyboards set to different sounds so that
> they *didn't* have to change all the knobs.
> As soon as you put programmability on a synth, it's easy to have a situation
> where the knobs don't tell you anything. LCDs and encoders are one attempt
> at a solution to that problem. I'm not saying they're perfect or even the
> best solution, but I think it's worth remembering why they're there and what
> they are good for.
>
> T.
>
>