Modulation wheel confusion

Steinberg Lounge
1

What is your favorite default behaviour of the modulation wheel?

  • Wah-wah style
  • Reversed wah-wah style
  • Bratwurst
  • Reversed bratwurst
  • Yes

0 voters

Weekend debate:
I’ve lately run into a surprisingly many VSTi which has the modulation wheel functionality reversed. As a guitarist I naturally think that when I move something forward it acts as a wah-wah pedal no matter if it’s routed to a filter opening, volume increase or anything else. But now I see more and more units have the opposite effect when I move the modulation wheel. Now, I wish I just could think again and reverse my brain when it comes to modulation wheels but the damn brain disagrees and refuses to cooperate!!! That’s what I get for playing with wah-wah pedals too much, right? :laughing:

Anybody who has the opposite view and a reason or two or fortythree?

2

I only use my mod wheel for parameters that I can choose.
in practice all of my synths allow positive and negative modifiers so I can decide on what I feel makes most sense on a case by case basis.
I’d say higher mod wheel for higher filter cutoff, so mod wheel up is fully open on a LPF, and reverse for a HPF.
If there is no clear preference I go with what I consider ‘default’ behaviour with mod wheel down.

You can try using an expression pedal to send modulation to get used to it’s behaviour? I use a pedal with my piano because it doesn’t have a mod wheel.

3

I voted for Bratwurst because I am hungry.

That aside, I prefer the mod wheel to do LFO modulation like the traditional purpose of that thing. There some patches where it may make sense for it to be a filter control or whatever, but usually, i use it for expressive wobbly accents, like it was intended years ago. :wink: :stuck_out_tongue:

Damned kids these days! :laughing:

Is there a mod wheel on your guitar too??? :mrgreen:

4

n o o o … but :bulb: :laughing:

5

I like the mod wheel functionality on my NordLead 2. It has a button directly above the mod wheel and it directs the mod wheel output to 5 different, predefined destinations. Filter, Osc 2, FM, Morph and LFO. Nice. I am like you in that I almost always want the mod wheel to control the filter.

However,
You can alter the source, destination and positive/negative amount of modulation on most synths so it is easy to change the behavior to whatever you want.