Sytrus - Please Allow Automation of Operator Shape Controls

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Dasmacoronn
Thu Dec 01, 2022 5:53 am

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Sytrus - Please Allow Automation of Operator Shape Controls

I know this has been discussed in the forums before, but I want to be an additional disgruntled voice to shed light on this issue. The fact that the shape modifiers on an operator can't be automated within Sytrus is mind blowing and honestly poor design. You're able to drag the parameter up and down as you're playing midi, the sound changes accordingly, and this doesn't seem to spike CPU even moderately, so why can't we automate them?

An example of a patch I'm trying to make that could greatly utilize this is a basic melodic sine patch with macros for dynamic control over the envelope and timbre. If you loaded a sytrus inside patcher, set operator 1 to a sine wave with volume envelope enabled, then had macro knobs to the input parameters for the operator shape modifiers, along with the global envelope attack/release and the PE/LFO amount, you would basically have one (melodic) synth to rule them all. With the shape control's positive tension you're basically morphing the sine with a square, negative tension morphs it into a kind of band passed square thing, skew would allow you to morph the sine with something akin to a band passed saw, sine shaper gives you additional odd harmonics, and the pre-filter does it's weird spectraley filter thing. So many timbral possibilities between all those combinations!!! I said one melodic synth to rule them all because imagine the evolution of your patch's timbre over a song if you were able to automate those parameters individually. Add onto that with PE/LFO amount automation for vibrato and global envelope attack/release macros, and your patch could evolve from soft sine pads into harsh square/filtered saw plucks and everything in between. Individually automate all the shape parameters and you got a patch with incredible range coming out of one operator!

There's the "Morph Oscillators 1-5" control to morph between predetermined positions of these shape controls or other waveform combinations, but that has a number of issues, the most blatant of which is you've now consumed additional operators where the shape controls would allow those changes within one operator. Then if you want to change multiple shape controls at once you'd have to predefine their positions in operators you're morphing and they'd be locked together. So if you wanted to increase tension and skew simultaneously you could do that, but the relationship between the tension and skew would be fixed and you'd be unable to have a passage in your song where the tension is zero but the skew is positive or vice versa. So you're basically locked to a single style of morph, which would either only affect one shape modifier, or affect multiple modifiers, but with a pre-defined relationship.

3rd party synths have this option (like Vital's oscillator modulation knobs), but then you lose piano roll capability like the color coded slide notes. I've never been a plugin developer so maybe my ignorance is showing, but from a sound designers perspective, being able to automate these parameters would open up worlds of sonic possibility with just a few clicks, so I can't imagine why the decision ever would've been made to prevent these parameters from being automated.



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