[Rwp] Automation

[Chris Belle]

As much a fan of UI based automation as I am,
because control surfaces have their own complicated issues, there are 
times when having close and immediate control of parms via a knob, even 
quick mapped from your midi keyboard is desireable.

When doing EDM, this is the one time when I would use a control surface 
more
than with traditional recording, where I would be happier with carefully 
placed bits of snapshot based automation.

But wanting to ride filters with a beat, or
doing other such feel based things could be done with snapshots, but 
would take a long time.

The computer keyboard is a reasonable compromise for writing automation, 
and I have used that method, but it still is not the same as having a 
nice mapped hardware knob to ride a filter and such.

Still, for ordinary bits of automation,
where people want to just do some volume changes, and pan, and mute and 
such, I tend to go with the UI based stuff,
because the problem with control surfaces is the way they are 
implemented in each daw, and the weaknesses of then has to do with how 
the control surface dll's are written for a particular protocol.
Like for instance, the mackie control surface implementation for reaper 
I understand is less than wonderful,
one can randomly just map controlers from pure cc, but then there are 
problems with that,
with things getting mixed up, Patrick was sharing with us some issues 
when we were having one of our not infrequent
control surface vs ui based
discussions on midimag,
I think people who just want a set number of functions and who deal with
fewer track counts, and don't try to do everything with their surface 
have a better time than folks who want to do everything with it.

Becaue you'll spend more time fiddling with your surface than getting 
work done.

So
this is why I gend to favor UI based things, which just always work, 
providing you can get at them.

Unlike midi, which was one standard agreed on back in the 80s, surface 
tech was never nailed down, so we have several different standards and 
they are not compatible with each other.
Still, just
quick grabbing a fader once in a while, is very useful,
even for simple things like automating the leslie of an organ,
or swelling a sstrings,
or a nice long fade out.

I still primarily use sonar,
and I am very fast at putting closely spaced snapshots close together to 
make simulate that kind of thing,
but if I have to do lots of something,
like once I did an EDM thing
where I used a resonant high pass eq filter and wanted to change 
frequencies all through the beat, kind of like the effec they used on 
the movie Flashlight,
I mapped it to a controler,
via sonar's quick mapping function available in all the controls on the 
applications menu, and
it was a lot more fun.

so in closing, I have mixed feelings about control surfaces.

They are hugely useful, and desireable, but if only they were easier to 
configure,
and more compatible across DAW's.

That's another reason why I have a real board here too,
the wonderful mackie onyx 1640i,
which gives me old school control of traditional faders and such,
no matter the underlying recording software,
and also makes it extremely conveniant to put signals of various sources 
together,
or quickly tweak monitoring senarios,
an analog board married to a
fine firewire interface is really a good way to go for a blindy who 
needs to cover a lot of ground,
quickly, we have so many of these touch interface thingies coming on the 
market now,
your 32 channel boards and such on the IPad,
it's all being driven by cost vs functionallity,
you can cram a lot of dsp power on a chip, and when you don't have to 
make real circuits,
out of  real hardware, you can offer a lot for a low price, but you give 
up something too.

And for us,
we have always that accessibility monster lurking,
so that's often the make it or break it consideration for us.

Good morning.




On 6/6/2015 12:37 PM, Roger Alexanderson via RWP wrote:
> i think though the best way would be if we could set markers and draw 
> envelopes. that way we wouldn't need a full controller of knobs in 
> order to record in realtime.
>
> On 06/06/2015 09:24 AM, Justin Macleod via RWP wrote:
>>
>> So is that the only way we can use touch and flash modes? I was 
>> wondering what they actually were. Also, since Roger mentioned it, 
>> how one assigns parameters to midi controlers.
>>
>> Thanks for any help,
>>
>> Justin
>>
>> *From:*RWP [mailto:rwp-bounces at bluegrasspals.com] *On Behalf Of 
>> *???????? ???????? ?????????? via RWP
>> *Sent:* 06 June 2015 05:22
>> *To:* Reapers Without Peepers
>> *Cc:* ???????? ???????? ??????????
>> *Subject:* Re: [Rwp] Automation
>>
>> Hello.
>>
>> The plugin ReaEar implemented automation dialogue, it is included for 
>> the track on the key combination alt + e and mastertrack by a 
>> combination of Shift + e.
>>
>>
>>
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