Eurorack Knob Idea | slacker news

It's an interesting idea (truly a clever way to accomplish this!), but I think it's addressing the symptom, not the problem. The symptom is that some jacks don't have associated knobs. The problem is that either the module designer or the module user is overly obsessed with miniaturization. The designer is at fault if it's a parameter that really should have had a knob with the jack and they avoided including one in order to keep things small. The user is at fault if they're trying to stay so space-constrained that they can't fit a module that outputs an DC voltage set by a knob into their case. There are numerous modules that do this (and often that attenuvert as well) and many of them are fairly small too.

The problem is that different people have genuinely different ideas on what kind of modulations are sensible. My go-to example on this is E-mu gear - a company that started out making big modulars in the 70s and went on to dominate the sampler/rompler space for about a decade before going bust during the dot com boom and being absorbed by Creative.

the nice thing about E-my synths was that they nearly all had big modulation matrices included, although users were often defeated by the 2-line LCD on their romplers. But one strange omission from the modulation destinations was filter resonance; all their later modules included a huge (arguably excessive) selection of filter types, but for reasons of computational efficiency you could not adjust the resonance while a note was playing. This wasn't too bad from the front panel because most people want to ride the cutoff rather than the Q, but the inability to modulate it inadvertently highlighted some limitations of the filter design.

I can see both sides, as I am a 'let me modulate everything' person when choosing gear but at the same time I quite admire 'opinionated' synth designs where flexibility is traded off against maximizing sweet spots. Sometimes it's better to have an instrument with limited sonic range but which responds very consistently within that, so 'you can't get a bad sound out of it'.