Deep parameter control

Eight knobs, and a synth with forty parameters. This is how you reach the fortieth without a menu.

What it is

Page 1 of CONTROL gives a voice the four controls anyone reaches for first — CUTOFF, RESO, ENV, DECAY. Everything else the plugin publishes fills further CONTROL pages, eight ports to a page, in the plugin's own order and under the plugin's own names.

Nothing in the driver knows what those parameters are. It asks the plugin what it has and builds the pages from the answer, which is why a synth nobody planned for still works.

Try it

  1. Select Group G (LEAD) and press CONTROL. That is page 1 — PRESET, CUTOFF, RESO, ENV, DECAY, LEVEL, REVERB, DELAY.
  2. Press the right arrow beside the display. Page 2. The names change to the plugin's own — abbreviated to fit, in the order the plugin lists them.
  3. Keep pressing. Each page is eight more ports. A large synth runs to several pages.
  4. Turn any of them. Each port is driven as a percentage of its own range, so a knob behaves the same whether the port runs 0–1 or 0–20000.
  5. Press CONTROL again to jump straight back to page 1 rather than paging around.

How it works

The four synth knobs follow the plugin that is loaded, not the one the snapshot shipped with. Change a chain's engine from the touchscreen and CUTOFF, RESO, ENV and DECAY rebind to the new plugin's own ports.

Host plumbing is filtered out. Plugins publish ports no player can use — freewheel flags, latency reports, enable switches that are not really switches. Those are recognised and dropped, so a generated page is eight things you might actually turn.

Discreteness is respected. A port with a handful of positions steps in whole units; a continuous one moves by percentage with the remainder carried, so slow turns still move it.

What it refuses, and why

A role the plugin has no port for draws dead. If a loaded synth publishes no resonance, the RESO column greys out and its encoder does nothing at all.

That is the same law the whole surface follows: a knob with no source is drawn dead rather than showing a number it cannot move. A knob that silently does nothing is the worst object on a control surface, because you cannot tell it apart from a broken one.

See also