[LAD] automation on Linux (modular approach)

Ralf Mardorf ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net
Mon Mar 22 13:25:12 UTC 2010


Louigi Verona wrote:
>
>
>         It is a different situation when you know that EVERYONE goes
>         through this. It is an absolutely different
>         story when you know for a fact that users of another operating
>         system have good working solutions of the
>         problem you are having. And so not having automation is a bit
>         weird. As shown above, automation is
>         essential in certain very widely spread types of electronic
>         music when you need to turn many knobs at
>         the same time to achieve the result. Asking 15 of your friends
>         to help you do this during recording is
>         a bit too much I think though it might make for a good record
>         into the book of records.
>
>
>     It's not true that this kind of automation really is done by heavy
>     mixing. Yes, e.g. when I used my Atari ST and Cubase I had a
>     Window with MIDI SysEx controllers e.g. for my Oberheim
>     Matrix-1000. A separated MIDI port and that it was. This kind of
>     automation is missing for Linux. But I wish to have some examples
>     off all that music that reportedly makes a lot of usage of
>     automation for the mixer. There isn't much of that music. Doing
>     this is unusual, it very often is done by inexperienced musicians
>     and hobby engineers because they guess it's the way to do it like
>     this, once they are more experienced they won't do it by
>     automation any more.
>
>     Ralf
>
>
>
> Hey Ralf!
> I do not think you understood me. I am speaking about automating 
> parameters of various synths. If you want the cutoff frequency to 
> change or wabble and at the same time have the resonance move and all 
> of that you want to feed into a controller that would LFO all that 
> against the volume of another sound so that both come in and out - all 
> of this takes lots of automation to get to the result. How can this be 
> possible without automation I do not know - only if you ask several 
> people to help you and train them to perform automations in real time.
>
> Louigi.

For this you need separated MIDI ports, because of the traffic for 
SysEx, but there are no other limitations, because it's done by SysEx 
there e.g. is no 7 or 14 bit limitation. We do have MIDI, the rest is up 
to the synth and of having GUIs added to the sequencer, like there are 
for the Atari Cubase. At the moment you need to get SysEx data e.g. by 
recording it, unfortunately modules like the Oberheim Matrix-1000 do not 
have any knobs to send the data. I dunno, but perhaps a synth like 
Phasex is able to send the SysEx data to the sequencer. You could record 
1000th of knob movements. I don't see any issues when doing it this way.



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