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.

On these pages the tab boxes carry the parameter names, not the channel names. A plugin's name rarely fits one row — PitchBend Range and PitchBend Step would both read as PitchBen — so the tab box holds the first line and the row under it holds the second. Sixteen characters, and neighbours stop looking identical. The names are the plugin's own, so a port whose LV2 symbol is output reads Gain. Every other page keeps the channel tabs, which is where a dashed tab still says a channel is not sounding.

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. Hold TEMPO and turn the same knob. Twice as fast. Hold it to get near, let go to land.
  6. 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. A port with named positions steps between those names and never lands between two of them.

TEMPO changes how far a turn goes, never what it sets. A speed, not a mode: nothing latches, and the same knob reaches the same values either way. It applies to every encoder on the instrument, not only these.

Switches: a knob that steps between words

A plugin does not publish one kind of control, it publishes three. Continuous ones are knobs — cutoff, resonance. Switches are not: a filter type is LP24 or BP, an oscillator is saw or square, a section is on or off.

A switch column shows the plugin's own word, and the bar under it fills left to right to say where in the list you are — empty or full on a two-position switch.

Its own encoder steps it. One position per detent, stopping at each end rather than wrapping, so you can walk the list and arrive where you meant to rather than round it. That is the whole gesture: the column that owns the switch already has a knob under it, so nothing else on the surface has to be spent on this.

F1–F8 stay the eight channels' mutes here, as they are in every mode. A row you hit without looking may only mean one thing.

Try it

  1. Select a synth channel — F, G or H — and press CONTROL.
  2. Page right until a column shows a word rather than a four-digit number.
  3. Turn the knob below it. The word changes, one position per detent, and stops at each end of the list.

What it refuses, and why

A one-shot trigger is not offered as a switch. Some plugins publish a port with a single named position — a panic or a re-init. Firing one off a knob you may brush past is not a thing to discover by accident, so those are left alone.

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