by John Bowen » Sun Jan 10, 2010 1:50 pm
The knobs are all rotary encoders, except for the Master Volume.
I understand the desire to have regular pots, because it's fast to program that way, and you get a good idea quickly of the ranges you're working with. Unfortunately, because the Solaris has so many parameters, some of the knobs require a wider range (such as the filter cutoff, which can range 12 octaves), whereas others only need to select from a list of 7-8 things (menu items), and the fact that each display is paged means that sometimes the knob is going to need to handle the wider range, and other times not. What we are doing to address this is an implementation of an acceleration routine for the parameters that have a wide range (but would not work for menu items), and you can switch between 2 acceleration rates with the Shift key. While this still doesn't make it as optimal as I know you are hoping for, it is a decent way to work with the large number of variables in the Solaris.
While currently none of the knobs have detents, we are thinking to put in a select number of knobs that do - ones that are arranged so that they ever only select menu type items, where you want precise and small increments. These would be for the Osc Type, Filter Type, LFO Shape, & probably alpha knob.
Even with the current acceleration, the filter cutoff knob still takes about 1 and 1/2 turns for full range, so I would have to say by your question that it is not 'expressive' enough (if a full range sweep is required within 300 degrees).
Optimally, each knob would 'know' the range it currently needs, based on whatever parameter it was addressing at the moment. This is a bit more programming than we have time for presently, but perhaps in the future we can build a more sophisticated and responsive knob behavior.
-john b.
The knobs are all rotary encoders, except for the Master Volume.
I understand the desire to have regular pots, because it's fast to program that way, and you get a good idea quickly of the ranges you're working with. Unfortunately, because the Solaris has so many parameters, some of the knobs require a wider range (such as the filter cutoff, which can range 12 octaves), whereas others only need to select from a list of 7-8 things (menu items), and the fact that each display is paged means that sometimes the knob is going to need to handle the wider range, and other times not. What we are doing to address this is an implementation of an acceleration routine for the parameters that have a wide range (but would not work for menu items), and you can switch between 2 acceleration rates with the Shift key. While this still doesn't make it as optimal as I know you are hoping for, it is a decent way to work with the large number of variables in the Solaris.
While currently none of the knobs have detents, we are thinking to put in a select number of knobs that do - ones that are arranged so that they ever only select menu type items, where you want precise and small increments. These would be for the Osc Type, Filter Type, LFO Shape, & probably alpha knob.
Even with the current acceleration, the filter cutoff knob still takes about 1 and 1/2 turns for full range, so I would have to say by your question that it is not 'expressive' enough (if a full range sweep is required within 300 degrees).
Optimally, each knob would 'know' the range it currently needs, based on whatever parameter it was addressing at the moment. This is a bit more programming than we have time for presently, but perhaps in the future we can build a more sophisticated and responsive knob behavior.
-john b.