Intuitive Modulation

I saw someone from Minimal on another post talking about the goal of intuitive modulation in the synth rather than having a mod matrix. So here are a few ideas I have for ways to make the modulation system even more intuitive:

  • Modulation Preview similar to Vital - In the synth “Vital” when you drag the LFO modulation over to a knob/destination that you want to modulate, it does a sort of preview as you hover over it so you can hear how that LFO would affect that destination before you actually drop the modulator onto it. Its kind of hard to explain through text so I hope you understand what im talking about. But basically that doesnt happen the same way in Current because when you drag the modulator onto something, it defaults to 0. I personally think at the least, having it default to something higher than 0 just gives a little better of a starting point to hear how that modulation would affect your sound before having to take the extra step. Its just a subtle thing, but its something that really speeds up my workflow with Vital, I can just hover over different settings to see how it might affect the sound.

  • Making what modulators are linked too even more obvious - I love Current and how much control it offers but its a tiny bit cluttered compared to other mainstream synths I use, not in a bad way, just that its alot of information all at once. It does show in yellow what modulators are linked too but I find it still be a bit hard to tell. I have a few ideas to improve this. One inspiration to improve it could be the way Phase Plant does it where they have a visible line/cord that attatches to the modulated setting when you hover over the modulation icon. Obviously that might clutter things too much in this synth so a more hidden way to do it could be to right click on a modulator and have it list what its linked too kind of serum does it or kind of how you have it for the macros and knobs on the oscillators. Another addition that would be nice is Highlighting the other tabs a modulator source is linked too in yellow, when im on the Engine page I can see everything a Curve links too in yellow on that page, but I dont have any way of seeing what other pages it also has links too, I have to manually check eeach area of the synth to figure that out. Also just how you allow right clicking to remove or add modulators to a knob, it would be cool if we can right click the modulators and point them to settings directly from there possibly. Another easy way to make this easier could be to allow naming of modulators so I could rename LFO 4 to “verb mod” or something like that and then ill know thats what that is going too instead of having to click around to figure out which lfo is controlling what.

  • Shortcuts for modulation settings - itd be nice to have some easy shortcuts for modulation settings like a ctrl + click or even just a double click to remove a modulation quickly or alt + click to make bipolar or unipolar

  • Manually type in modulation amount - I dont know if im missing something but its hard to set the modulation amount on the pitch for instance, to 12 semitones even, Ive tried the shift or alt drag and its still kind of hard to get it right on 12.00 so allowing me to manually type that in would be nice and save some workflow time

  • Duplicate modulators - I wish I could ctrl - drag a curve to an empty modulator slot and it would duplicate all the settings instead of having to save the shape as a preset and then set it all up again in the next one

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All great feedback, we’ve been considering doing something like a localized mod matrix, so a mod matrix you can open per modulator, or per destination, instead of a global list of everything all at once.

I’m going to read this feedback a few times though since there are some low lift and high lift things in here we’re happy to address

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Oh awesome! A localized mod matrix sounds great!

I liked the old Rift modulation colour scheme. I think having everything in yellow makes things confusing. If all the modulators have a unique colour it’s easy to know which modulator is modulating the control without having to look at everything twice to see which patch of yellow is highlighted.

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Yeah… we tried to keep the color coding system in Current but it was just too many colors.

What do you guys think of the idea of being able to right click and assign the color of a modulator?