Designing patches forward, (re)building them backwards
Most of the times when I have an idea for a patch, I start building it with the left-to-right, top-to-bottom mentality.
But once I’ve made something I’m satisfied with (which is not that often), and I have a model of the patch in my head, I like to make a clean slate and rebuild it from scratch.
Except I always start from the end and work backwards. It just feels like the sensible thing to do.
I only built it forwards in the first place because I didn’t know what I was doing! It takes knowing what you are doing to build it backwards…
What goes into the master out to begin with? Ok, an instrument rack. Now inside that rack, starting from the end? last amp. Before that? Reverb? Delay? EQ? Etc.. But thinking of the fx chain in reverse, and working back to the oscillators or whatever is producing sound!
Does anyone relate? Thoughts?
Comments
As long as you don’t use layers, which I’ve been doing recently to streamline UI and don’t have to scroll too much, working backwards indeed sounds like a good strategy. I also rebuild instrument racks often. It’s such a shame layers can only be added at the end, and not at the beginning or somewhere in the middle. Cutting/pasting breaks a lot of connections that take a lot of time to reconnect.
Even so, I start by scaffolding my patch with layers and/or racks, and again working back retracing my steps
But I hear you about broke connections. It would be great if you could select a connection and choose “insert X module in between”, but that’s too much of a stretch 😅
what I do is take a lot of notes during the designing process, that helps
oh and btw, cutting and pasting is the build forward approach, you built something before you realized it should go in a container
what I’m saying is once I know better, I start with the container