Look at the red circled vertical bars on the right side. Also the small dot on the left DNA spiral drawing.

It seems to restrict the max value of the knob. But when the knob goes down, the value is kind of reversed.

What does that do and how do I adjust it? I can't find any information about this from the manual.

There also seems to be some thick colored lines on the spiral. Most basic patches don't have that dot or thick lines.

Excellent question.

The Knobs

• The vertical lines are the gene setting ranging from 0.0 to 1.0.
• The filled arc is the selected branch setting. You can notice these changes when you play different grown branches that produce different sounds.
  
  

The DNA Helix Sliders

• The big hollow circle is the gene setting, the same as the vertical line on the knobs. (these are sliders btw, so they work like Synplant v1)
• The filled color in the background represents all the different branches you have. You can notice that these will grow if you turn up the Mod Wheel, for example.
• The small dots are the currently selected branch, the sound that is playing, the same as the filled arc in the knob.
  
  

As you might have noticed, at the extremes, the branch settings will bounce back, which is why the filled line sometimes moves in the opposite direction of the knob turn.

Branches are random variations of the seed settings. You will have to find a branch that evolves your sound in a way that you like. There is no way to micro-control these values manually.

Thanks for the detailed description.

In some presets, for example, the sustain level doesn't go up over a certain point. Is it because the selected branch has a little bit of deviational settings from the base gene setting.

Yes, exactly. If you put vol_sus at 1.0 and there is branch deviation, it will, unfortunately, always be downwards because of the bounce at the extremes. You will have to find a branch that minimizes this. In this particular case, limiting the value or locking it would have been a useful power-user feature.

A good question indeed. This is touched very lightly upon in the manual, but greatly expanded upon here. The thickened sections of the gene parameter bars, the branch dots, the knobs and their visuals, as well as the displays of the modulators are Excellent additions to v2. This is something I had to experiment with for a while to get the hang of it enough for me to be able to kind of predict outcomes from branch arrangements. The interface was a joy before and a Pure (faster with clarity) joy now to do detailed genetic engineering.

Reminded me of Edward Tufte.

i didn't see them, you must turn the modwheel "open"... to see it...

i am using Synplant 2 with MPE, so the branches are, in the first series of patches i made, always at their smallest, with pressure i extend them, great, by the way. and sometimes strange results, or one strange result when pressing, not to the point..

but now i see them..

you don't see them appear, i.e. you don't see any changes in the DNA menu, when using pressure as modulation and modwheel is at 0 (zero). perhaps by design.

Yeah, they update in real-time. So if you have not grown any branches, the DNA Helix will only show circles and all the knobs will have a filled arc that reaches the vertical line. As you turn the mod-wheel or in your case increase modulation by pressure, you will start to see the how much it affects each gene.