I’ve got a (hopefully) simple request for the LFO meta-whatsit-thingy… The way it currently stands, the noise LFO is very blocky… I’d really very much like a smoothed noise LFO generator… I was thinking perlin noise at first, but I was informed that pink noise does pretty much the same thing and takes up less CPU cycles…
basically, what I want to do is use slow, smoothed noise, to gate my filters in such a way that it makes a track sound degraded, like it’s being played off of an old wrinkled tape… or a an old record that’s not crackiling as much as fading out occasionally… this would allow me to make really gritty sounding ambience in the style of NIN, etc… either way, let me knows what joos thinkz
…And if you know of any VST plugins that will do this sort of thing already, please let me know so I can try them out
Assuming that you’re just doing lowpass filtering and adjusting the cutoff with an LFO, Renoise’s built-in Filter2 effect has an inertia setting. If you set this quite low - around 1% for example, then the cutoff will take a longer time to react to the changes made by the noise LFO. If you play around with the settings of the LFO you can get an effect fairly similar to the fluctuating treble of a old cassette deck.
To get much closer to the degraded tape sound though, you would need to do other tricks such as warping the pitch now and then, as well as applying some kind of saturation to emulate a slightly overloaded recording, etc.
more waveform choices in the LFO metadevice would be great, like the sawtooth ramping the other way ?
simple to impliment i imagine (though i have little programing knowledge) . . . but useful.
also . can the LFO metadevice be synced to the bpm ?
and how about an LFO retrigger, connected to an instrument note on or the pattern start. . . this would be seriously useful . .
i know automation exists and so do envelopes in the instrument editor, but these features in the LFO would greatly expand its potential . . . .
What i’m missing in the LFO section above all is something like the rows control of the delay that lets you specify how many rows you want the LFO period to be. Today, an LFO speed of 6 (why 6??) loops the LFO once every row, 3 gives the LFO a period of two rows… etc… so if you want an LFO with the length of one standard pattern of 64 rows, you’ll have to use 6/64=0.094 as a speed. Not only is a bit of a brain twister, but because of the lack of precision it also means that the LFO will give you 126 periods every 125 pattern.
A lot more modulation source manipulation possibilities would be nice. Things like mixers, multipliers, inverters and note-triggered modulators would go a long way. Something like the flexibility of Kurzweil’s V.A.S.T. modulation system, i guess.
And btw… it’s possible to make an inverted saw with a phase-synchronized triangle wave. The triangle wave is basically two mirrored saw waves anyway. To get a “decay”-shaped saw, set the phase offset to 40 hex and make sure you have the LFO properly synchronized to the pattern length and reset it to 40 hex whenever the triangle wave reaches 0 amplitude.
For instance, if your pattern is 64 rows, set the triangle LFO speed to 0.094 (to loop the triangle wave 1 time in the pattern). Start the pattern with the LFO reset with the effect X640 (where X is the location of the LFO in the effect chain). On the 32:nd row, set the effect X640 again to keep the triangle wave from rising and starting at the maximum position.
Another thing i find troublesome with the LFOs is that if routed to a midi CC, they will easily kill your midi communication because of the excess of signals being sent.
Yeah… I’ve also found myself annoyed by the lack of precision with the frequency slider… on both ends of the scale… i’d like to both be able to go faster and slower than the lfo currently can. More waveforms in general would be nice too. Perhaps a custom LFO shape could be implemented in the future… one that uses an envelope-like editor to define the shape of the LFO…
… either way, a smoothed random LFO would be extremely useful for me right now… as many of my current sound processing ideas have to do with pseudorandom textures. Perhaps the reset button could start the random sequence off with the same seed at the beginning again… so that the pseudorandomness could be played out the same way every time if need be… kinda like with dblue’s glitch
There is another problem with the current method of programming the native LFO in its current form - if you want to automate changes in the speed there is an issue getting exact values…for instance speed “3”, when programmed into the effects column with the nearest value, gets set to “3.047” or something. Definately noticeable over the duration of a track. It is possible to get it more precise in the automation window, but this is incredibly fiddly as you cannot see the values of the points you’re marking without switching back to the DSP chain window…
Definate setback in the program; this has pushed me to resample things which should have been easily programmable in several instances.
I’m at work right now so i can’t test this, but holding the left ctrl key when setting points should let you see what values you put there. It’s still incredibly fiddly though. With envelopes in Cool Edit (and i suppose Audition) you can double-click on a point to get an input box that lets you type in exact values for the point… i wish renoise had this.
Haha… yah… yet another annoyance of mine is the fact that you can’t see the values you’re entering in the automation window… I personally think a tooltip should pop up automatically that tells you what the value is as you’re changing it
How about putting those LFO’s at least show speed in milliseconds, I want sync!? How about automatable invert lfo wave button? How about possibility to draw your own LFO wave? With vectors?
… I always wondered about that 
