Hello.how do I control the volume of the synth engine’s sine wave?I’m looking for a way to adjust the output level of the sine wave synth engine.
It is not. Moreover, unfortunately, it’s not even savable by preset.
So if you don’t want your Ribbons to produce sounds from MIDI notes, you’ll need to program a routine in your midi controller to send Synth Volume OFF (CC#54 Value 0), or program a controller (exp pedal, knob or encoder) to control CC54.
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The reason it isn’t persistent is because we had users accidentally muting the synth by turning the volume all the way down and then panicking because they thought MIDI wasn’t working.
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That’s a valid point. But maybe it is possible to make it savable to presets?
This is similar to some of the four track looper settings. When we designed Ribbons, we originally thought of the synth and four track looper more like hidden bonus features than core parts of the device. Because those settings are somewhat buried, we chose not to make them persistent so they would always return to a predictable state after power cycling.
For example, imagine using the four track looper in a live set and turning all the loop volumes down to zero at the end of the performance. If those settings were persistent, the next time you powered on the device you might have to go back into the looper and raise every track volume before it worked the way you expected. The same idea applies to the synth. If you accidentally set the volume to zero, that could be pretty stressful in a live context if you suddenly couldn’t figure out how to get sound back.
We can make more settings persistent, but there is a tradeoff. Adding more parameters to the preset system would require a factory reset, which would erase all user presets.
So in general, we are interested in adding more persistent settings over time, and we did add several in 2.0, but we have to be careful about which ones make sense to persist.
That said, after thinking about it more, I suppose this idea of a predictable default state could potentially be handled by the Init preset instead. We need to think through the consequences a bit more, but it is possible.
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If I may add - my personnal preference would be to save those states to presets. I am not that much worried about those “hidden bonus” settings being reset to their certain “default” state. But I see a lot of value in them being savable per preset.
I am a “preset” type of person )) When I turn on my large home pedalboard, the first thing I do is hit a button on my MIDI controller that launches a routine that I call “Ground 0”. It initialises “safe” presets on all devices, puts all MIDI-controllable loop switchers to “true bypass” with all loops off, etc.
So for me being able to fully control the state of all my MIDI-capable pedals via such “initial presets” (much like the brilliant idea you have implemented in Ghosts and Ribbons with the Preset 1).
Being able to control the Ribbons’ synth state this way would also be a plus for me personally. If I want to use Ribbons’ synth engine, I will have a preset for that ))
Right, and we get that. Looper and synth settings are the only settings on Ribbons not saveable into a preset. So the question is if making them persistent between power cycles (and therefore possible to save into a preset), is worth wiping everyone’s device out there.
Oh, sorry for being so dumb )) Of course, in order to make something savable in a preset this something needs to first become persistent between power cycles. I somehow separated those two things in my head)
Speaking of wiping devices - as I understand, at present there’s no user-accessible way to dump presets from the pedal, to somehow load them back later?
All good.
No because there’s no way to export data from Ribbons. Possible in theory with Ghosts since it has a USB-C port.
If the synth engine were velocity-sensitive, wouldn’t that solve the issue? You’d be able to play softer for lower volumes.
Note velocity is not a good volume control) You need it for other things, expressivity, dynamics etc.
And while I totally support the idea of velocity sensitivity for the synth engine, it is not the replacement of the overall synth output volume control.
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