Rapture Instrument Page Knob Conventions - Thoughts?
I've wrapped my head around Rapture Pro, and am moving forward. All my sounds are showing up, things are working, blah blah blah. This thread IS NOT about people chiming in with "it's working for me too!" or "it sucks!" I'm programming patches, I like what I hear, and I'm currently driving Rapture with an
Akai Advance keyboard so I have plenty of hands-on control.
Which brings me to the Instrument page.
There are those eight knobs, and that's great. But I need to put some thought into a consistent assignment for the controls. For example, if I'm going to want to change Filter Cutoff a lot, I don't want it to be Macro Knob 1 in one preset, Macro Knob 6 in another preset, and so on.
I had to think about this with Kore as well when not using NI instruments that were pre-mapped. So I started considering what kind of controls I'd want to have mapped for various patches, and so far, have come up with following for typical synth sounds:
Filter Cutoff - gotta have that, right?
Amp Envelope Attack - good for expressiveness with swells
Amp Envelope Decay - great for changing the rhythm with percussive patches
Tone control - for example, to pull back the high shelf on the EQs to dullen the sound, or raise to brighten. Maybe a treble control on some patches. or bass control on other patches.
FX 1 "More" control (e.g., more reverb, more chorus, more treble, whatever)
FX 2 "More" control - another one like the above. Could also control pitch for hard sync or something like that
So that's six parameters that seem like good macro knob candidates. What about the other two? I was thinking maybe these could be "to be determined" controls. And since you can do macros with multiple parameters, they could be unconventional like "more intense" or "more laid back" by controlling multiple parameters simultaneously.
And, what would be a good order for them? I was thinking the first four would map across controls 1 - 4, and the FX controls would be 7 and 8.
It might make sense to have different "standards" for different types of instruments. Like maybe guitars would need something different compared to synth pads. It's very convenient that you can include names in nice big letters, but I figure the less I have to read and the more I can just grab a knob instinctively and have it do what I expect it to do, so much the better.
Thoughts? Ideas? It might be helpful to have fairly standardized real-time control layouts.