What is the problem?
Three of the buttons placed around the display don’t serve useful functions when editing a synth patch. Patch editing feels cumbersome on the Play, so assigning some useful actions to those buttons would simplify the entire process quite a bit.
Problem 1:
The green colored buttons do exactly the same what clicking on the main encoder does.
Problem 2:
The red colored button does absolutely nothing.
What should this feature achieve?
Here are some suggestions.
The green buttons could do a patch preview similarly how they work in the patch browsing UI.
To Preview a Patch. Turn (Screen) to scroll through the patches
• Press the Upper Left [Screen] button to preview the highlighted
patch. The upper button previews with note C4.
• Press the Lower Left [Screen] button to preview the highlighted
patch. The lower button previews with note C2.
The reasoning behind this is simple. If the user is scrolling through synth paramerers with ther left hand using the big encoder (see the picture) and adjusting parameters values with their right hand using the tempo knob, they have no free hands left to preview a patch with the view keyboard. So the user either has to constantly move their right hand between the tempo knob and view keyboard, or they have to give up on using tempo knob and use only the big encoder which also requires two additional clicks to enter a parameter and then go back (the infamous ‘menu diving’).
Speaking of the red button (aka Perform) it could be used for different things:
- to quickly jump between different sections of the patch e.g. Osclillator → Filter → Amplifier → Modulatin etc. That would speed up patch editing significantly.
- revert currently selected parameter to its defauls state.
- ??? ideas are welcome
