That is totally not my experiencejtsterays wrote: Sat Jan 24, 2026 5:29 pm Also here's an argument for 8 instead of 4 macro knobs: The reason sound designers like 4 more because they want to pack more into each knob, to make them really stand out/impressive when you turn them.
In my experience, sound designers do not want to assign any macro control at all. It's extra work for diminishing returns, and often frustrating work. Because with each degree of freedom to bend parameters come settings that are too loud, too shrill, too quiet. Or maybe when one macro is up, two others have no more effect. Often a macro would control 1 parameter for a purpose, and 3 more to tame side effects when interacting with other macros.
Again, we had an employee add 4 XYs to our 20 or so soundsets for Hive 2 and Zebra 2, and it took him half of his time over 7 years. Because the sound designers would not do it and because it just is an amazingly tedious job to do.
We even once had a community effort, we asked people if they'd help us out ("Zebra 2 XY community project"). It did not work out, some people took 3 months to send back 20 presets out of which 5 were usable, and we had to rework them ourselves. People underestimate the effort it takes to do this. It is often more effort than creating the preset in the first place.
Q: Is there is any decently complex synth with a ~1000 preset factory library that has 8 macro knobs (which can control multiple parameters with different weights), and each preset has all of them set up?
