Quote:
Originally Posted by HUROLURA
My own way of using sound is not really attempting to get a special type of sound but more about man to machine interaction by twicking some parameters from a start sound basis and let thing progress iteratively. Hardware control is more comfortable/necessary for that purpose. I also use this process with softsynth but I miss the quick interaction possible with well thought and layout control hardware. Using the mouse is slowing down the process.
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Have you ever looked into the Novation Automap software? It basically brings what you've mentioned above to the soft synth world, although it does require a Novation controller (not a bad thing since they are great hardware anyway). If you can imagine all of your soft synths being controlled using the same knobs/buttons for the same functions (i.e. cutoff is always in the same place etc) you get the idea. This could of course be accomplished with most midi controllers / soft synths anyway, with some tweaking and set up, but there are hassles that go with most of those approaches that Automap makes a lot easier, for example it has built in templates for all the popular soft synths and it just detects it when you load it and maps it for you (assuming that's what you want it to do). Its basically designed to keep your hands on the knobs more than the mouse.
Even though I have the software and use the controller, I tend not to use Automap much, but that's just a matter of my own workflow. I tend to use the mouse and software UI to navigate and tweak the main things, like finding a sound or fiddling with the range of a knob to see how it will sound while automated. Then at some point, once I've already integrated the sound into part of a track / a loop or whatever, I will manually link the mod wheel and one or two of the knobs along the top to whatever I plan to tweak in real time (that's when the part of the hardware interaction you spoke of happens in my workflow).
Now that I formally think about it like this, 99% of the time, as part of the music creation (not sound design) process I am only going to be tweaking 1 or 2 values in realtime, so depending on the sound I almost always map the mod wheel to either cutoff or a vibrato/pitch warble, and one other knob across the top to maybe one other parameter. When I am creating new sounds or dramatically tweaking existing sounds, I'm much more mouse oriented. There are some things with sound design that are just extremely limited by most hardware control surfaces. Even 20+ years ago, with certain hardware synths I prefered a computer based editor for some things, because it just takes too many steps to get to some functions with a limited set of buttons/knobs / readouts. When I think about a modular synth like Zebra, even attempting to make all of the same functionality available on a hardware device without a mouse, typing keyboard and decent sized screen would be a nightmare.