Is there a way to draw pitch envelopes for both samples and VSTi in the default envelope editor? or does the particular VSTi really has to support that option?
All of the instrument modulations are currently only applied to samples. Quite likely that it will always be this way, I think.
Ahh ok i understand, but would it technically be possible for Renoise to have a default pitch envelope for VSTi’s? just wondering. I dont know how other apps like cubase etc. handle pitch for VSTi’s.
There is no direct method to send absolute pitch to a VST plugin. We can send MIDI notes, but even those may not always translate to an exact known pitch or frequency.
The only way we could apply anything remotely like a pitch envelope to the plugin, would be to hack it with MIDI pitch bend commands instead. Even then, there’s still no direct way for us to easily instruct the plugin to “pitch up by this exact amount”.
It’s up to the plugin if it supports pitch bend or not (let’s face it, most do these days), and also what range the pitch bend actually operates on (could be a few semitones, could be a few octaves, may or may not be configurable, and so on).
Then there’s the issue of “voices”. In Renoise, with our sample-based instruments, we know exactly when each note was triggered and can easily keep track of it, so we know exactly how to apply each pitch envelope to which voice. With plugins, we obviously know when the notes are triggered, but after that it quickly becomes quite meaningless from Renoise’s perspective, and is basically impossible to keep track of exactly what the plugin is doing, except to check if it’s still outputting some noise or not.
We don’t know if the plugin is monophonic or polyphonic, we don’t know how many voices are playing at any given time (nor could we apply multi-voice envelopes anyway), we don’t know how the plugin is generating its sound, and so on. All we can do is roughly apply MIDI pitch bend to it, and hope that it does something roughly useful.
Maybe such a hack is “enough” to do… something vaguely interesting, I don’t know.
Ultimately, for such control over the pitch envelopes, it will always be best to use the plugin’s own internal features for this.
Ok, thanks for the explanation 