Over the years I’ve worked out I can just about manage to hang onto muscle memory for a maximum of three different synth manufacturer button combo/menu diving UIs. So I’m good with the Hydrasynth (which is pretty intuitive anyway TBH), I’m good with Elektron (so far… Digitakt now, most probably DN and ST to follow I think) and I can just about manage my way around one of Roland’s less weird and annoying button/menu UIs (TR8S is OK). But if I add in a whole other bunch of gear with very different idiosyncrasies, then I’m just searching through the manual far too much because I can’t remember stuff and the whole vibe gets killed off for me.
This doesn’t apply to anything where the front panel controls tell you almost all you need to know like a Minilogue or pretty much anything that’s one knob per function with clear labelling on the panel. It’s only the gear where most of what you need is nested in a bunch of menus that aren’t logical, and where there’s a complicated button combo to do basic things that’s not obvious from the panel labelling and that isn’t consistent between different types of operation.
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