| This is an ancient problem which has been around since synthesizers first got patch memory in the 1970s like the Prophet-5. There are a number of ways to handle the knob or fader's physical position not matching the current value: * As soon as the control is touched, it becomes "live" and the value jumps to wherever it is. This is the simplest, but most disruptive approach because a value can jump abruptly. * When the control is moved, it has no effect on the value until it physically reaches where that value is. This avoids any disruptive jumps, but can be confusing because a control feels "dead" until you reach the right point to get it alive again. * I think there are other approaches where moving the control starts interpolating the live value to where it is. There's no perfect solution, but it's tractable and not a huge issue in practice. Motorized faders are nice but very expensive and have shorter life spans. For knobs, you can more easily avoid it by using endless encoders instead of potentiometers and then interpret its current location as the current value. (For example, Elektron hardware and the Hydrasynth take this approach.) But you lose the nice tactile affordance of having the knob stop at either end of its extent. |
And yes by rotary encoders I meant those that rotate indifinitely. And I miss my Elektron Model:Sample, too bad it lacked the sampling function otherwise I would have kept it.