After trying almost everything to achieve envelopes with a halfway accurate attack phase for continuously playing waveforms, I’ve finally tried, what I expected the least to work. But it seems indeed to be the way, that works best so far. The Signal Follower does no ramping, when passing its params and it’s not, like I always thought before, several ticks behind, when passing its output. So, what I’ve simply done is, I’ve created a very basic instrument with maximized volume and used it as a shaper model for the envelope I want to apply to my actual instrument. After triggering the signal follower the model is simply muted. And it totally works out, even at 4LPB/12TPL.
Another thing I didn’t expect is, a 0gFF glissando works indeed pretty well to change the pitch without recognizable portamento. So there’s no need to trigger the origin waveform of the actual instrument again. In the end you were right, It-Alien.
It’s actually really simple and it’s still just a workaround. But seriously, that’s a huge step towards true and alive synthesizer sound in native Renoise.
WTF? It seems, not many people get, what this means or is good for. Okay, I’ve done a way more obvious example. Listen to it and answer yourself the question, when you have EVER heard something like this from native Renoise before. I’m pretty sure the answer will be “NEVER EVER!”.
I think many people are at work or school, you need to be more patient. Sounds good here btw, though too much work for me to set-up if I wanted such a sound from scratch, but nice proof of concept.
Sounds good. It’s amazing what you can do with a few simple waveforms.
I know you have raised this filter issue before where you get a noise on automated butterworth filters. Ie. try changing the filter model on the “Follow The Model” track to Butterworth then there’s some kind of static noise going on when it’s automated. I hope this is a priority for the dev team as it’s a bit annyoing from a mixing point of view.
I usually don’t use butterworth filters for automation anymore. They’re nice and useful to cut things for mixing, but for sound design I prefer the resonance-capable filters. Just miss some variations of these, with 6db, 12db and maybe 36db. I’d really wish we had variable filter slopes. But way more annoying to me is the clipping of the Maximizer. Doesn’t make much sense to limit a signal, when the limiter itself is clipping anyway.
When I got it right on the first short view, that’s actually not really additive synthesis, where all waveforms are generated from sinewaves only (which normally totally hammers the CPU). Nevertheless these are some pretty nice sounding substractive mono synths, with a really nice overall sound. Nicely done!
I would like to sidechain a kick to a butterworth filter on a bass track, but the nasty audible noise ruins that easy solution, instead I use the Moog filter which is okay, but not the sound I prefer
Well, you don’t depend on filters for that anymore. Have you tried to trigger an EQ with the sidechain? Also a Moog with a slight resonance of 15% seems to have slope at least very similar to the Butterworth4.
I think that this kind of strategy could be the ultimate solution to my problems with static envelopes in XRNI instruments. It looks a bit complicated to set up, but in the end, I confess that the quality of the resulting sound is better than anything heard before. (Note : once again, the native chorus=>multitap=>mpreverb dsp rack produces a fantastic presence & depth)
It’s not really that complicated. I guess there might be more people interested in setting something like this up for their own work. I’m gonna put up a detailed setp-by-step tutorial and description here.
There are a few things you have to think about, before you start. How many envelopes do you need and where do you want to apply them? You can apply the model-shape to all common params-envelopes, except the pitch.
In the following example I’m gonna use 1 envelope model, to apply its shape to Volume and Filter. But of course you could also setup 2, 3 or more models for more envelopes.
Add a Signal Follower to your “Model” track and connect it to the “input” of your Hydra on the instrument track.
The setup is finished here.
What you now need to do, is arranging your instrument track. If your setup works properly, you wont hear anything of what you arranged, when you hit play. At least not, until you add the trigger on the “Model” track. Here you do all the velocity stuff, note durations, note offs and so on. On the instrument track you do the raw note changes only. Everytime you play the trigger on the “Model” track now, it will sound as if you actually hit some key on the instrument track.
That’s it… Your setup might still need some adjustments, like “release” of the Signal Follower, sensivity curves and so on. But that’s all a matter of personal taste and hard to describe in a tutorial. You have to fiddle this out yourself, I’d say.
I’ve tried both, but the butterworth4 just seem like the ideal solution, the slopes for EQ and Moog with resonance doesn’t look like the clean cut I was aiming for, but now you make me think maybe I should let go of that ‘visual’ thought
Great work Bit_Arts! Thanks for sharing!
I’ve tried similar approaches before using signal follower, but you’re example has more finesse.
Signal follower is, in-fact, my favourite renoise tool.
Tip: one can achieve some nice, midi-delay type effects by, you guessed it, putting a delay device before the signal follower in the “model” track and automating it’s send, delay time etc (make sure the delays are panned centre so the signal follower will behave rationally).
Playing around with this atm. The glissando doesn’t really work satisfying. :-/ Well, it works fine as a glissando of course. But not as a hard transition between note pitches.
Edit:
Simple workaround to avoid the glissando, but keep the waves running: add a 2nd column to the track and switch/mute with each note between both columns, setting the muted signal to 00 volume and doing “silent” glissandos. Sounds pretty clean, but at this point one has really to decide then, if the result is worth all the work and effort. To me it is without a doubt, someone else might of course think different here.
Patience might indeed be something I totally lack. 
Also a Moog with a slight resonance of 15% seems to have slope at least very similar to the Butterworth4.