Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Modular Synth Panels

Hi Scott and others -

Couldn't find the right message to reply to, so I'll start a new
thread. The volume of replies is getting out of hand anyway.

While sliders are cool, I'm definitely solidly in favor of knobs on my
klee. I think Clickmrmike has seen my roland jd-800, which I've had
since they were introduced back in the early 90's. 54 sliders. While
these are considered to be some of the best sliders ever put on a
performance instrument, at any point after the first year or so the
chances of having all 54 sliders working correctly, even after
rigorous cleaning, are minimal at best. With just 16 sliders, your
chances get better, but there are still going to be problems - and
this is a "will be problems" situation, not a "might have problems"
thing.

Sure, 16 spectrol pots are going to cost a bit, but they will be
foolproof, and probably work perfectly with no problems for a lifetime
(or at least my lifetime, or rather what's left). And actually 16
spectrols isn't that much - I built a milton once with 64 pots - not
spectrols, but pretty close in price. Heck, the doomsday has 18
spectrols on it. And even alpha pots are a bit more reliable than most
faders in my experience.

So Scott, if a panel with holes in it is in the line-up, I'll buy one,
if it appears in time, otherwise I'll finish up this fpd file and bite
the bullet. By the way, my design is actually based originally on my
old milton panel, just with a lot of stuff moved around/changed, etc.
I don't have the size handy, but clickmrmike has my old panel - how
big is it? That one was based on Jeff Pontius's design which is in the
files here. It's the full bells and whistle design, btw, based on the
designs of clickmrmike and Will and Bill. The current design 16 pots
in a row) requires the smaller knobs, although there's room to
stagger/offset the pots and actually use the larger ones - I haven't
really got my head around that yet though.

BTW, this isn't meant in any way to put down the slider fans - I think
the slider klees I've seen and heard are fantastic - it's just my
personal choice to use knobs. Call me old fashioned, call me a fuddy
duddy, as long as you call me.

Steve