Controls - separation between performance and others

u0421793

I’m now convinced that this is a key important thing in synths, whether hardware, software or bi

There are some synths with quite wide-ranging control ability, and some of the controls on those synths — if you dare twiddle two or more at the same time — will result in you never ever ever being able to return to anything like the sound you were on a second or so ago

Other controls aren’t so audacious, you move them at the same time — even a pair or more of them — and it’s no problem getting back to the sort of sound you were just on

—-

During the 80s some synths started separating ‘performance’ controls from the rest of the synthesis chain – initially a few controls beside the keyboard

As time went on, some synths developed an explicit demarcation between performance controls over MIDI (the Continuous Controller list) and other controls that were basically the other sort of MIDI control (Non-Registered Parameter Numbers)

Nowadays, though, I think things have gone in an unhelpful direction that I can probably blame on modular synths – everything is equally twiddleable, there’s no real distinction between any knob or switch or parameter and any other, such that it’s quite easy on some synths (not all) to adjust a patch during a performance (eg a live stream or a gig) and lose all hope of ever getting back there

It’s important that synth owners know up front which parameters and their ranges should be designated as ‘safe’ to move (the performance controls) to avoid getting embarrassed or lost

dendy

for performance i would always use external midi controler wirh let’s say 8 or max 16 knobs defined exactly for this purpose a as performance parameters which i can tweak without risk i cimoletely break the patch but with enough effect to altering sound …

also on digitak/digitone/syntakt is nice feature where you during performance just hit FN+Yes - then you can make any tweaks you want, even tottally destroy sound - then you just hit FN+No and you are back where you was before you started tweaking … i wish every synth has such feature, it’s extremely useful

wim

There's this thing we used to do back in the day called rehearsing.
White tape and a sharpie are a bit radical, but also pretty effective - for hardware at least.

tyslothrop1

Depending on your host macro controls can replace Sharpie and tape on the software side of things.

u0421793

Those behaviours (rehearsing, defacing, etc) are all very well but – do you own a Cat (the Behringer or Octave sort, not the quadruped)?

Try doing any of that with a Cat synth on some of the more complex FM patches, and it’ll totally defeat you almost immediately

Similarly with a lot of modular setups – twiddling certain parameters will take you through a doorway of no return

With my Cat, I’ve learned that most of the time if I want to do eg a melody line and make it sound interesting by twiddling the knobs a lot, I’ll immediately find myself totally out of tune because so many things are cross modulating in a highly chaotic architecture that it’ll be a very long time before I’ve tamed it again, so I tended to set up the patch to be as interesting as I could get it as a start point, and then limit myself to a subset of things that were safe to move, and on the Cat, that’s not really that many!

Yes, if you’re talking about a basic synth like a Roland SH-09 or 101 or 202, all the parameter ranges are very well designed to be unextreme and safe no matter what you do to it, eg on my SH09 I can pretty much change everything and then immediately put it back to where I was with confidence – that’s the way it’s designed

But… the Cat? No chance