State Device Revisited

A while back i suggested a “morph” style device for storing, recalling and crossfading DSP effect chain states.
I’d like to bring this back up, not as a metadevice, but as a foldout feature of the track output device, and quite a bit more limited.

Right now, you can have quite complicated chains of effects, where tiny adjustments early on can cause very strong alterations to the overall output. What this creates, in a lot of cases for me at least, is a situation where you kind of fear going on experimenting, because you’re likely to (practically) irreversibly eff up a result you were happy with. The way to deal with this now is to make incremental saves of the effect chain or song. Which isn’t very fun, and more of a speedbump than it needs to be.

In lieu of true morphs, it’d be nice to have a fold-out panel that lets you store and recall one or more settings for every device in the chain. Set up your chain, hit store. Tweak it, you don’t like it, hit recall.

This is the very most basic of the ideas.

And so forth:

  1. On top of this, it’d be nice to be able to store several states and recall any of them without destroying them.

  2. On top of THAT, it’d be nice to be able to automate recalls; This is a gentle return to the idea of a hypothetical automatable morph device that lets you crossfade between states, or “weigh” states to create a blended state.

  3. Finally, it’d be nice to be able to perform mutation operations on sets of two states, letting you do genetic crossover between parameters, or interpolate between them based on a value of 0-1; This specific functionality could be done as an external xml tool if the states were stored in the song xml. I use the patch mutator on the Nord Modular G2 software quite often for taking two patches i enjoy and experiment with crossovers and interpolation.

Just throwing this back out there because i, once again, ran into a situation where i’d changed 5 parameters on such a granular chain that i can’t seem to find my way back to what i used to have. Which sucks.