looking for a few good ideas
  amongst the irregular verbiage

Putting it all together (V)

Thu, 05 July 2007 06:27    in Computers, Studio

This series of posts began here.

Previously I covered the design of some standard controls for virtual hardware. Now let's put them together into a mockup of a software synthesiser. I chose to revise Arturia's CS-80V because it's the greatest synth ever. Here's the controls for one voice module:


(Click on the image to zoom)

Things to note:

  • The toggle buttons that enable the high and low pass filters on the voice are colored green, to match the filter level sliders.
  • The current input focus is located on the VCF initial level (IL) slider, indicated by the red dot. If you pressed the TAB key at this point, the dot would move to the attack level (AL) slider.
  • The range of the PWM percentage slider is 60-90%, reflected in the displayed value of the control. At its minimum setting, the slide shows a value of 60.
  • Likewise, the VCA sustain (S) slider shows a maximum setting of "10", while the release slider is the default 0-99.

That's all I planned to say for now on this topic. If I think of anything else I'll continue the series. Thanks for reading.

Postscript: I implemented the mock-ups using Visual FoxPro 9.0. The controls are more-or-less fully functional (even if the control panel itself doesn't do anything!) If you would like to experiment with the controls, you can download the VCX library  here.

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