How every control works

Aconite’s controls behave the same way everywhere, so you only learn them once. Knobs respond to drag, scroll-wheel nudge, double-click to reset, and hold Shift or Cmd for fine adjustment. Right-clicking a control opens the Modulate menu and shows its live modulation rings; controls can be MIDI-learned; and hovering reveals a tooltip where it teaches something non-obvious.

This page covers those shared behaviors in one place, so the rest of the manual can focus on what each control does rather than how to operate it.

Turning a knob

Drag a knob up or down to change its value. Aconite uses vertical drag by default (move up to increase, down to decrease) which feels natural on any pointing device and gives you smooth, continuous travel across the full range.

• Hold Shift (or Cmd on macOS) while dragging to enter fine-adjust mode. The knob still responds to the same drag gesture, but the value moves in much smaller steps. Use this any time you need surgical precision: dialing in a specific cutoff frequency, trimming an envelope time, nudging a pitch interval.
• Double-click any knob to snap it back to its default value. If you have made a mess and want to start that parameter over, double-click is the fastest reset.

Scrolling to adjust

Hover any knob or fader and scroll the mouse wheel to nudge its value up or down a step at a time, without having to click and drag first. It is the quickest way to make a small change: point at a control, roll the wheel, done.

• Hold Shift while scrolling for a fine step, the same surgical precision you get from Shift-dragging, one small increment per wheel notch.
• Scrolling works everywhere continuous controls do, including the mixer faders and the discrete stepped cells (like the mixer’s rarity divider), so you can spin through their positions with the wheel too.

Tip

The same behaviors apply to sliders and other continuous controls, not just knobs. Drag to change, scroll to nudge, Shift for fine, double-click to reset: everywhere.

Entering a value directly

Right-clicking a knob opens its context menu. At the bottom of that menu is an Enter value option; choose it and type the number you want. This is useful when you know the exact value you are after: a 440 Hz reference frequency, a round envelope time, a precise semitone detune.

You can also double-click the value readout (the small number displayed near the knob while it is active) in some sections to jump straight into text entry.

The right-click context menu

Right-clicking any knob or slider opens a small menu with several options:

• Set to default: same as double-clicking. Resets to the parameter’s default value.
• Enter value: opens a text field for direct numeric entry.
• Modulate: opens the modulation assignment panel for this control (see below).
• MIDI-learn: arms MIDI-learn for just this control. Move a physical controller and the CC is mapped. A control that already has a mapping shows a Clear MIDI mapping option instead.

Modulation rings and assignment

When a modulation source is routed to a knob, the knob grows one or more colored rings around its outer edge. Each ring corresponds to one active modulation connection. The ring fills and empties as the modulation signal moves, so you can watch modulation happening in real time while you play: an LFO sweeping a ring around the Cutoff knob, or an envelope pulling the Resonance ring as each note decays.

To assign modulation to a control:

1. Right-click the knob and choose Modulate.
2. The modulation panel opens, listing every available source: envelopes, LFOs, the mod wheel, velocity, aftertouch, and more.
3. Click a source to connect it. A depth slider appears; drag it to set how much that source moves the control. Positive depth pushes the value up from its current position; negative depth pulls it down.
4. The panel also exposes a Via selector for each connection. Via is a curve or transform that sits between the source signal and the depth amount; it reshapes the modulation before it reaches the destination. You can use it to make a linear LFO act exponential at one end, gate the modulation so it only kicks in above a threshold, or invert the response. Via is the difference between “this source moves that knob” and “this source moves that knob in a specific shape.”
5. You can connect multiple sources to the same knob: each gets its own ring, its own depth, and its own Via.

To remove a connection, open the Modulate panel again and click the source to deselect it, or drag its depth slider all the way to zero.

The full modulation system (sources, depths, the matrix view) is covered in Modulation matrix.

MIDI-learn

Any knob or button can be mapped to a physical MIDI CC. The fastest way is through the header’s global MIDI-learn arm button: arm it, click a control, move a knob on your controller. But you can also right-click any specific control and choose MIDI-learn directly without arming global mode first.

Mapped controls show a small indicator when MIDI-learn mode is active. To clear a mapping, right-click the control and choose Clear MIDI mapping.

Full MIDI-learn details (scope, session behavior, and CC conflicts) are in MPE & MIDI-learn.

Labels and controls light up together

Across the parameter panels, every control and its label are linked, and the link works both ways. Hover a knob, slider, or dropdown and its matching label lights up (it brightens toward the accent color and turns bold); hover the label instead and the control it names lights up the same way. The pairing is exactly one-to-one: each label belongs to a single control, so it is always clear which name goes with which knob.

This is purely a “find your way around” cue for busy panels; nothing about the sound changes when a control or label lights up. It just makes it easy to confirm you are about to reach for the right control, or to see at a glance what a given label controls.

Tooltips

Hovering over a control for about a second reveals a tooltip. The name and current value are always shown. Where a control does something non-obvious (like how FB Sat works differently from Drive, or what the Voicing setting changes inside the filter model) the tooltip adds a short explanation.

Tooltips are intentionally sparse: if a label is self-evident, there is no tooltip. If one appears, read it; it is there because the behavior rewards knowing it.