I posted this in another topic but got no responses to it. It was mentioned that the automation was limited in that it doesn’t do square waves.
Renoise has the linear, point and cubic shapes for its automation. I propose a new one called “bar”. This would make stuff I do a lot easier and for some reason, no DAW that I’ve tried allows you do do this.
Say you open up an automation window for a synth that has a cutoff at 50%.
There’s a “snap to:” dropdown box that selects how many lines it will snap to. So if it’s set to 1 , then grabbing and dragging the line results in this;
I reckon that your suggestion would allow to make such things quite faster, but renoise already allows you to create (almost) square waves using the “points” curve type. I’ve said “almost” becase there will always be a little transition from the bottom to the top of the square.
however, I can’t think of a scenario where such kind of curves would be useful; could you name one?
I was mainly considering it for tweaking the kickdrum in hardcore techno. At the moment I use point mode to do it. Let’s say I’ve got a 4-on-the-floor beat and I want the 4th kick in a pattern to be tweaked then return to a “default” value. (sometimes you want to blast the odd beat with some extra distortion, or some other effect tweak.) I put a point on line 0 which has the default value, then on 16 I put the tweaked value, then on line 20 I copy & paste a point with the default value again. With “bars” that were snapped to 4 lines, I wouldn’t have to copy & paste the default value. I could just have a straight line that is the default value (as in the 1st picture) then just drag the region between line 16 and 24.
First thing I thought when looking at the example mockups is you do get more resolution with the automation editor but this essentially is what pattern commands do.
In order to get this across for you. The pattern commands ATM can not get to the level of accuracy to be useful in these situations. It’s possible this may change in the near future with OSC support,however I have not seen the implementation, so I can only speculate on this.
I just thought of a limitation to this. What if you wanted a bar that goes from say, line 2 to 6? Maybe you could just have it like the second pic but if you drag horizontally then the bar snaps each subsequent line.
