The arc and grid make ideal companions. The grid is discrete, with edges, the arc is infinite, borderless. They complement each other beautifully. The grid is good at things the arc is poor at and vice versa. The grid buttons make dealing with high resolution data problematic. One technique I wanted to explore with the pair was to abstract high resolution data onto the grid.
Portamentos does just that. The grid displays several parameters (pitch, amplitude level, attack, decay, portamento time and filter cutoff) per step. Instead of using the grid to enter in data, which would be fairly coarse, the grid is used to indicate parameter value and to select which parameter and step is in focus. The parameter value is abstracted twice, both on the grid and arc ring. Once any parameter is selected on the grid, the value for all visible steps are displayed.
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