little curiosity about modulation

[exh]

First, the obligatory props: The XMF filter is a right beautiful piece of work. I was lukewarm on it when playing with patches made from scratch ('cause mine, you know, suck), but then I started just adding it on to all the good presets and oh wow. It brings some real grit and growl to zebra that *maybe* was possible before, but now is easy and fun. The thing is great. And also props to howard scarr, his new bank is excellent. For whatever reason I just adore the elevension and vger patches, but there's gobs of great stuff to explore in there. And when I started tacking the XMF on them, magic.

Now, the issue I'm having is with modulation. Hopefully it just hasn't clicked with me, but there are two things bugging me. First of all, so everyone knows things like the oscillator panel has, in addition to the parameter controls, various unassigned buttons for patching a source modulator to the parameter. Maybe those modulation knobs are always to the right of the control they're modulating, if so, please someone make that explicit, because sometimes they don't seem to be, so I have a hard time figuring out what's being controlled on occasion. Along the same lines, some sort of visual cue that connects paired knobs together would be very helpful. And finally, another visual cue that makes it easier to distinguish which knobs are controlling parameters and which knobs are controlling other knobs would be very nice. Particularly when opening someone else's patches, often I'm just looking at a sea of knobs and it's hard to get a sense of what's going on. For reference, I think Massive does a great job of letting you see 'at a glance' what's going on in patch, but of course it's also a considerably simpler synth.

Now, also with modulation, am I correct in that there are only 4 slots in the generic mod matrix? Everytime I'm working on a patch, I seem to constantly bump into a wall with the modulation stuff. For example, with the XMF filter, there's no generic source knob by the cutoff, so as far as I know, the only way to modulate the cutoff is via the modulation matrix. So if you've got 2 XMF filters and you want velocity controlling the cutoff, right there you've used half your modulation matrix.

On a similar note, I'm not keen on the way the mod matrix flips the target around on alternating rows. I assume this was done for space reasons, but my brain is already looking at enough info in the zebra window, it doesn't really like translating back and forth just to glance through the mod matrix.

So anyway... these are small issues and I feel like most of it is just something I'm not quite figuring out with modulation, but based on what I understand right now, personally, if I had a choice, I'd rather remove all the modulation knobs from the panels and instead have a large 20-slot or whatever mod matrix with maybe some drag and drop connections between things, i.e. I could easily imagine the center routing page being replaced with a matrix and just dragging and dropping source and destinations on it. That's just me, though.

[pdxindy]

Now, also with modulation, am I correct in that there are only 4 slots in the generic mod matrix? Everytime I'm working on a patch, I seem to constantly bump into a wall with the modulation stuff. For example, with the XMF filter, there's no generic source knob by the cutoff, so as far as I know, the only way to modulate the cutoff is via the modulation matrix. So if you've got 2 XMF filters and you want velocity controlling the cutoff, right there you've used half your modulation matrix.

The XMF filter has 2 dedicated cutoff modulation controls on it

It goes Cutoff - Resonance - Modulator - Modulator

Those are both for cutoff.

The mod matrix is a bit confusing visually as it alternates between the 4 slots.

Someone recently suggested that the mod dials have a dark grey instead of black to distinguish them from the regular controls. I think this is a good idea.

The Osc is a bit confusing. The top of the osc has:
mod Wave Tune mod Detune Vibrato

and the border groups them so:
mod | Wave Tune | mod Detune Vibrato

I think more consistent would be:
Wave mod | Tune mod | Detune Vibrato

Here is a quick mockup

[Tarekith]

Much better IMO.

[exh]

Thanks much for the info, very helpful. I like the mockup but would probably take it even a little further, like having the knob colour for the modulation sources somewhere between black and the background colour or something. At any rate, clearly I'm not the only one who feels it'd be nice if there was more to distinguish and associate the mod source/destination pairings, so hopefully urs addresses at that at some point.

[Tarekith]

I'd love to see some sort of visual indication of modulation too, one thing I'm surprised more softsynths don't do. If I'm modulating a control, please show me the control moving through the range of modulation so I can see exactly what's going on.

[beej]

Don't forget that this isn't always possible. Let's say you are modulating the phase on an oscillator. Play a note, and the GUI can show you the position. Now what should it do when you play two notes at once?

One knob for display, but multiple notes with independent modulations.

In Logic's Sculpture for instance, it will show the morph position moving if you are only playing one note, but the display turns off if more than one note is going, for this very reason.

[kodama]

I think you would just show the amount assigned, not the amount applied in real time...

[Tarekith]

Personally, I'd like to actually see some type of realtime feedback from the control itself when feasible. Obviosuly a parameter being modulated at audio freq's makes this impossible (or multiple notes as above), maybe it could should the range of modulation in that case.