[sdiy] What do you like in a synth control surface?

[Ingo Debus]

Am 23.02.2015 um 20:14 schrieb Tom Wiltshire:

> I don't think he means that he wants scale marking telling him what the setting it (after all, most synths have a vague "0" to "10" without even any units) but rather that if the knob is at 12 o'clock, the sound you hear is the sound of the knob at 12 o'clock. It's the old programmable synths problem of "what do you do when you load a new patch?".

Yes, exactly.


> I don't think I'd agree with Ingo's hard-line "at all times" position, but there certainly needs to be a way to hear what you can see. The Korg Polysix has a very useful "manual" button on the panel, which gives you the patch which is currently set up on the panel. Ideal for programming. For playing, you can load a patch from memory, tweak if you want to, and it doesn't matter so much that the knobs don't all reflect the actual parameter values.

I have a Polysix. It's a great synth, really. All is fine when you create patches from scratch. But things get ugly when you load a patch from memory and want to tweak it. Sometimes you don't even know if the VCA is controlled by the envelope generator or in organ-type mode. And when you're finally done tweaking a patch, some knobs do reflect their actual setting and some don't.
The Polysix has a very simple architecture, but think of a more complex synth, say, with several VCFs. If you recall a patch and want to change just the filter attack, you first have to find out which of the many ADSRs to tweak. You probably have messed up the patch before knowing which parameter you're searching for.

Ingo