Static modulation

I am trying to set up a meta device chain in Renoise, but have some trouble achieving it. The first one to help come up with a solution will be dubbed the prince or princess of meta devices!

What I want to do is the following:

  1. Each new note trigger a filter cutoff.
  2. The cutoff should not be sweeping, but should be static.
  3. A Sine LFO should determine the static value (i e running in the background all the time, but only “updating” the cutoff value when a note is hit)

I think it should be possible by using some tricks, but I’m not sure. Any takers?

Depending on what you exactly mean by “Static” in point 2, i suspect at least changing between setting cutoff and “disabling” cutoff.
1+2:keytracker device plus LFO in pulsating mode ->one to trigger static vlaue cutoff 1, the other to set static cutoff 0 (or no effect) . Keytracker min and max values will both be on max so that the LFO is always triggered with the maximum value (for the static on effect).

You don’t use a sine LFO, but Pulse lfo.
In the LFO device you can use a pulse-waveform LFO, but you probably want a one-shot effect so you need to draw the pulse manually in the Custom LFO graphic display and there you can also trigger the One-shot button.

Here’s a quick hack I came up with:
3894 dblue-static-modulation-for-joule.xrns

Velocity tracker triggers a pulse in the first LFO. This LFO has a custom envelope which briefly sets the destination parameter of the 2nd LFO to the filter cutoff, and then rapidly switches it back to ‘none’ to disable the modulation. The 2nd LFO runs freely, as requested.

Definitely not pretty, since you get a tiny ‘pop’ at the start of each note as the old filter frequency rapidly changes to the new filter frequency. This may or may not be a big problem, depending on the source audio. With this sawtooth instrument I used, it has a very sharp attack which results in some sound leaking into the cutoff change. Other sounds with a slower attack probably wouldn’t be that noticeable.

Alternatively, if you’re simply looking for a bit of random filter variation on each triggered note, then it’s a lot easier (and less glitchy) to use a paused (ie. slowest possible speed) random LFO, and then simply trigger its reset function with each note.

Here’s an example of that:
3895 dblue-random-modulation-for-joule.xrns

Thanks dblue! You are hereby dubbed the prince(ss) of meta devices :) Very clever to automate the destination parameter!

Too bad about the infamous keytracking delay pop. I’ve read it’s because keytracker device suffers from one tick delay.

I think it’s more to do with the fact that these types of meta chains are a total hackfest, automating stuff that probably shouldn’t be automated in such ways to begin with. Still, it roughly gets the job done!

Nice Dblue. BTW I really love your demo track in Renoise (forgot the name - house song). It is my go to study track.

That’s a release quality banger man. I am sure you are getting your stuff released, but if not, someone is screwing up!

Static LFO for effects would be very useful, for example, to use a static phaser to beef up the tone of a guitar or bass sound. I use this trick all the time in my (hardware) guitar setup, it’s very versatile and can give some awesome sounds.

Years ago i had a pedalboard that didn’t let me set the effect’s LFO position directly. I remember achieving this by setting up an external one-shot LFO that glided the effect’s speed from a certain value to zero, over a (short) certain amount of time on patch load. This took some trial and error to get the right values, but could be done. I figure the same would be possible with most Renoise effects.

I think the correct term I should have used was “step modulation”. The best approach is to use a sample&hold function. There is a sample&hold formula device somewhere on the forums, btw.