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Automation is a powerful tool for customising the sound of your project. It can provide anything from a simple 'automated' mixing desk - moving the volume levels up and down as the song progresses - to changing the sound of an instrument, its effects settings, and even the tempo of the entire song. Virtually any control can be automated, allowing for very powerful control of your song.

Contents 1 Automate This! 1.1 Fading in 1.2 Adding expression 1.3 Eighties acid effects 1.4 Sounds flying past 2 When not to use Automation 3 Navigation

Automate This!

The list of controls that can be automated is vast, as can be seen from the list in the Automation Editor reference. However, it is worth looking at this list in more detail to see the sheer quantity of controls that can be automated:

• Track controls such as the Volume and Mute settings, in both the Beat + Bassline Editor and the Piano Roll Editor.
• Virtually all Instrument controls:
  • The settings of the Instrument Plugin itself, worthy of a subsection in its own right:
    • All the knobs, such as phase, tuning, and pan.
    • All the multivalue selectors, such as the waveform shape of each oscillator and even the mix type between them.
  • The knobs controlling the envelope, LFO and filter parameters.
  • The radio buttons controlling the filter and LFO.
  • The type of filter selected.
  • The arpeggio type and length.
  • The controls for any effects you've got on the instrument, and whether all effects are on or not.
  • The MIDI channels to receive and send note data on.
• The master Tempo, Pitch and Volume.

Basically, right-click on it, and if it's got an 'Open in Automation Editor' option in the context menu, it's automatable!

There are two things to remember when automating controls:

• The automation for controls on tracks in a beat/bassline only goes for the first bar (or as many bars as the beat/bassline pattern lasts).
• All other automation starts from bar 1 of the song editor.

Let's look at some examples of how to use automation in your songs.

Fading in

The most common and simplest use for Automation is in fading an instrument in at the start of the performance, so it doesn't dominate the piece when it enters. This is accomplished by automating the volume control of the instrument in the Song Editor.

The first thing you will find out is that automation is always measured from the start of the song, regardless of where the instrument track has its first segment. So if you have the first bar of piano roll in the instrument track appearing in bar 33, you will need to start fading the instrument in at bar 33 rather than bar 1.

The second thing you will find out is that a fade in will usually last for many bars, and it's easier to draw a diagonal line of that length when the horizontal scale () is reduced to about 25%.

The third thing you will find out is that having lots of control points is unnecessary for volume, as people are not very sensitive to small changes in volume. In addition, having more control points means more editing later if you change your mind. Set the quantisation control () to around 1/2 or 1/4 and you can still get a relatively even line without having a lot of unnecessary control points if you want to change it later.

For example, in this piece:

The automation on the first Moog track's Volume control looks like this:

Note the time ruler's position - the fade in starts at around bar 41, when the first notes occur.

Adding expression

By automating the master tempo control to get slower (a rallentando) as you approach the end of a phrase and then resume its pace immediately after, you give your piece expression - as if a live piano player were emphasising that section. This looks somewhat like a single 'negative' sawtooth taken out of the automation, such as

Eighties acid effects

The Acid House and Acid Trance movements were famous for using the Roland TR303 to play a repetitive melody and varying the filter cutoff frequency and other envelope parameters to change the sound through the entire piece. Because of the repetitive nature of the melody it is tempting to use a bassline to store the melody, but the automation in the Beat / Bassline Editor only goes for as long as the pattern - therefore, the automation you put in will repeat itself every time the pattern repeats, rather than continuously changing.

First, create a new track with any instrument,(not VSTige. In this example we will use the filters on LFO/ENV tab, and VST instruments cant utilize this feature. The bundled ZynAddSubFX generator is a VST instrument and it can not use LFO filters.) put a bar of repetitive notes in it, and then copy that to create sixteen bars (I copy that bar in the piano roll and paste it three times to create a four-bar phrase, and then copy that segment in the song editor to get four four-bar segments). Then open the instrument's plugin and select the Envelope/LFO/Filter tab:

Turn on the Filter section, set the filter type to Moog, and make sure that the LFO amount is set to zero.

Then right-click on the filter's Cutoff control and automate it:

You can draw various shapes - blocks, rising and falling curves, sawteeth and jumps. It can be difficult to draw with the mouse. Since .4.4 sh+leftMouse Clicking will create strait connected lines. Use this to make slow fine linear gradual changes.

http://tangram.dnsalias.net/lmms-imgs/sounds/automation-howto-acid-1.ogg

The project file can be downloaded here:

http://tangram.dnsalias.net/lmms-imgs/sounds/automation-howto-acid-1.mmpz

It is worth noting here that the frequency of control points changes the sound. At bar 17 there are four upward sweeps with the quantisation set to 1/16, and then from bar 21 there are four downward sweeps with the quantisation set to 1/32 (i.e. twice as many control points). The changes to the filter cutoff do not happen in an analog fashion, like someone turning a knob - they happen digitally and jump instantly between settings. This means that you can hear the changes in frequency as distinct steps - the four upward sweeps may sound a little stuttery or jerky and the downward sweeps may sound smoother. For fine control you may even want to use 1/64th quantisation. However, since it is more difficult to get a truly even curve or line by drawing, the downside to this approach may be that your own inaccuracies in drawing the control points become audible and are harder to edit out.

Sounds flying past

In one song I wrote I had a series of stacatto claps in a pattern and I want them to fly from right to left, like a drive-by shooting. I automated the pan control (i.e. the X direction) of the instrument in the beat-bassline editor:

I then created a diagonal line from pan-right (+1024 at top) to pan-left (-1024 at bottom):

And now the sound 'flies' past from right to left!

http://tangram.dnsalias.net/lmms-imgs/sounds/automation-howto-flyby.ogg

Notice that the sound 'resets' to the right after each bar, because the pattern is only one bar long. If I wanted another set of claps that flew in the other direction, I have a couple of options:

• I can create a second pattern that has automation taking it from left to right and alternate the patterns in the song. This means that you have a second track, which may be inconvenient.
• I can add a second bar of notes (via the pattern's context menu Add Steps option) and then have the automation return to the right. This would limit me to having the claps return immediately after they left, which may not work in the piece.

You can download this as an MMPZ file from

http://tangram.dnsalias.net/lmms-imgs/sounds/automation-howto-flyby.mmpz

When not to use Automation

Though Automation gives you great power and flexibility over the sound of an instrument or your entire piece, there are some times where it is overkill and others where there are easier ways to achieve what you want.

• Automation currently lacks any tools to make regular shapes such as sine waves. Drawing these can be quite difficult, especially if you are looking at drawing such a shape for a long time. Instead, use an LFO - either in the instrument plugin or as an effect.
• Automation can be applied to change the characteristics of each note individually - for example, to have a note gradually fade away or gradually introduce vibrato - but it is tedious to do this to every note. The LFO settings in the instrument plugin's Evelope/LFO/Filter section allow you to set the attack rate of the LFO to gradually fade in vibrato, and the envelope can be set to give a long decay time.

Navigation

Reference: Automation Editor

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