[PaulDavisThe1st]

> I’ve been wanting a generic-looking, wood-grained “tablet display” covered with a dozen PHYSICAL faders, sliders, and knobs that you can leave permanently hooked up to a DAW that interfaces with virtual synths for over a decade now!

https://faderfox.de/

Just one of several. These have existed for at least two decades, save for "dynamically update all the text around each dial", which has a variety of complications that I won't go into here.

[vunderba]

Yeah I should have clarified - I have plenty of generic MIDI controllers. The special sauce is reflecting the "VST" rendering/presentation of its own sliders/dials onto physical ones.

This means not having to look up and down constantly between your computer monitor and the physical hardware since the knobs/dials each have small screens/displays are 1:1 matches (so Frequency Range, Sub Audio, Clamping Point, Oscillator Frequency, etc).

VSTs are rather inscrutable and I think it would be difficult to design in an agnostic way that played nicely out-of-the box with the majority of them. Doesn't stop me from lusting over the possibility though.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

I am a little confused. I think you the mean reverse of the usual mapping: (a) from the surface to the plugin GUI (b) the plugin GUI is drawn to look like the surface. Right?

Interesting idea, but creates a bit of a coding conflict: the plugin developer writes the plugin GUI (typically feeling they've lavished a lot of love on it); they're not in control of the layout of a control surface (and indeed, may have no way to know what it is). So a job that would really be the job of the control surface manufacturer can't be done because that's the domain of the plugin developer.

It's fairly easy to imagine a single control surface offering this for a tiny subset of all possible plugins, but getting beyond that seems pretty much impossible to me. There was a protocol that Digidesign/AVID bought back in the mid-oughts which did maybe 60-70% of this, in the sense that it provided negotiation between the plugin and the host/surface. Problem was, it was so complex that almost no 3rd party plugin developer or control surface developer was willing to get involved.

[vunderba]

Yeah I'm not explaining myself very well. I don't have a lot of knowledge around the inner workings of how the GUI aspect is specified on a VST but it seems to be incredibly diverse which is why while I'd love to see something like this - I just don't think it's really feasible.

It's all for the love of physical dials - that tactile ability to play with a synth is such an underrated thing.

I've got tons of VST recreations of older synths like the Minimoog Model D, Prophet 5, etc. but it's just not the same fiddling with controls using a mouse...

[piltdownman]

The MP Controller is about as close as you'll get unless you go for an AIO solution like an Astrolab

https://mpmidi.com/u-he-plugins-mp-controller

https://www.arturia.com/products/hardware-synths/astrolab/as...