You are very welcome.
I wish Geoff was still around.
On 10/22/2018 5:43 AM, Yogan, Yamuna Jivana dasa wrote:
Hey Chris!
Wow! Thanks a whole lot!
And what good timing I had, eh?
Anyway this should indicate the value of keeping good old tips around and not deleting too many things that are really useful.
I know I know, sometimes there's just too much stuff, but I'd rather choose then to spend a few days going through them in smaller chunks at a time instead of getting overwhelmed with stuff to delete and inadvertently deleting something I would later regret, in the frustration of the moment. I guess we've all been there.
So thanks again, and a whole lot so!
Hey, I guess I wrote this E-mail somewhat in Geoff Chapman style, having just read his mail before writing this! <LOL>
Hope you are all well!
Yamuna
-----Original Message----- From: Chris Belle
Sent: Monday, October 22, 2018 11:45 AM
To: jsonar@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [jsonar] Re: Geoff Chapman - Automating Effects Parameters - article wanted
Hey, wouldn't you know it, recently after I cleaned out my ancient email
folders and such someone would ask for this.
I'm kind of a pack rat, I try and keep everything useful but sometimes
you just got to clean house or drown in it.
Anyway, I found some of what you wanted I think.
I still have some other places to look, but here's what I managed to
grab for now.
Hope it helps.
And hope Geoff is doing well, I miss his easy going personality and
knowledgeable posts.
snip
ok dudes, since i'm on the cutting and snipping trail, for those who may
have missed it first time around 3 months ago, i'm pasting in here
again, for those with good concentration spans and a desire to learn,
and no money with which to buy a remote mixing control surface, or who
do not have little keyboards or digital mixers to use as control
surfaces.
following this method can allow you from the keyboard, to effect slow
changes without using record automation commands, which can sometimes,
in my experience of mixing, actually be harder to get right, than the
way I'm about to describe. although this is much much harder in sonar,
than it ever used to be in cakewalk.
I'll just pre-empt this lengthy explanation, by telling you that sighted
dudes can do this offline drawing in of changes they may wish on various
parameters, using their rodent and graphical thins called envelopes on
visual representations of their audio data, called clips.
this is an alternate vip way of achieving what i call an offline mixing
methodology. so, slow down your speech rate, pick up your coffee, sit
back and be ready for study!
snip snip:
so ok but what if you don't have anything with faders or knobs on it and
you still wanna be able to input automation data for parameters to
change them smoothly over time.
snapshots won't do that for you.
you may recall, if you're not asleep yet,
that the third and final way sonar talks about inputting automation
data,
is by drawing envelopes on clips in the clips pane.
I said that this isn't a method that's vip friendly. and now I'm finally
getting to the initial point of this document.
in cakewalk pro audio 9, you could use on an audio track, a function
called "insert series of controllers."
and you could set your start and end times, and the values you wanted
your controlers to change to over that time.
you could not change the state of your curve from linear, if you
couldn't see, and you still cant!
the sightlings can do this graphically!
in sonar, this feature is not immediately apparent as being available
for audio trracks, and appears unavailable if you try.
however, as I initially said, a cakewalk tech support guy helped me find
the way!
what you do is:
1. create/inserrt a new midi track in your project wherever you want,
either by hitting your applications key and hitting i, which I think
inserts at the bottom every time, or by right clicking on the number or
name of the track, above which, you wish to insert your new midi track,
and hit i.
2. mess with your arrow keys till you know you have focus on this newly
inserted midi track. you may like to name it so you don't lose yourself,
by hitting enter over the place where it says, "track x", so you can
easily locate it again.
3. select that track by hitting comma key. if using jaws, you should
hear it respond with "track x selected".
4. move to the portion in your project where you'd like to start the
change in volume for an audio track. for this example, we'll go for a
volume change of, say, approx 5 DB over a whole measure, from measure
22 to measure 23.
and let's assume we want this volume change to occur on an audio track,
say, track 4, or any track you've got audio on currently.
So, move to bar 22 and hit f9, the set from to now key.
5. move to the beginning of bar 23, where we want our volume change to
end,
and hit f10, the "set through to now" key.
tip: alternately, if you want, you could simply open the from/through
times dialog by hitting shift+f9, typing 22 in the from field, pressing
tab once, typing 23 in the through field, and hitting enter.
6. after double checking you are focused on, and have selected your new
midi
track, not the audio track that you eventually want to effect here,
activate the insert menu with alt+i, and arrow up till you hear insert
series of controlers.
if you are indeed focused on your midi track, this should not be
unavailable.
hit enter to go in here.
The first field in this dialog should show controller. tab to the next
field, you should see perhaps that number 7, for volume, should be here
by default and doesn't need to be altered.
tab one more time and note that it's channel is filled in as channel 1.
you can leave that alone as well.
tab a 3rd time, and you should be at a field where you enter the value
you want your series of controllers to begin from.
(Tip: you can hit alt+b to jump directly here in future.)
This is where the action happens. now this gets a bit tricky, because
in order
to get a smooth change happening in our audio, we kinda first have to
have an
idea of what the current value of the controller is going to be,
in order to accurately reflect the current value of the volume control
shown in the track view before our change occurs,
and then, we have to have worked out before we get to this stage really,
what actual DB volume level we want the
audio to be at the conclusion of our change, and then calculate
what controller value wil most closely represent that new level!
if that makes sense.
in other words, a track is playing away at a particular volume, ok?
In the track view, ignoring the volume trim control for a moment, this
will be displayed as a DB value setting on the volume control of that
audio track.
oh, for those of you who might be reeeeeeally new to this game, a value
of this control of 0.00 db, does not mean the volume is all the way
down. of course it couldn't mean that, else you wouldn't be hearing the
track yeah?
it relates to a concept called unity gain which i won't go into here,
cept to say that it's not turning up or down, the level of the audio
from the level it was recorded on to the track at.
it is neither boosting nor cutting the level, so it's value is rendered
as 0.00 DB.
now what we need to know though, in order to do this offline automation
thang I'm describing here, is, what given DB values of this control,
translate to, on this other scale, of controller messages, where 0 is
all the way down, and 127 is maxed out all the way up.
Later I'll describe a table showing how these values relate to each
other, but for now.
for this example, I'm going to assume that the audio's been playing away
quite happily at -4.9 DB, but now we need it to rise to a volume of 0.0
db over this measure.
So now we have to have some idea, of what these volume values, relate
to, in terms of midi controller values, so we know what to enter as our
beginning value, to avoid glitchy jumps in level, and what our ending
value has to be, in order for it to take it to the volume we want, in
this case 0.0 DB.
now because I've done some research on this this week,
i can now tell you that in approximate terms, a controler value of 80,
corelates to a volume parameter value of -4.9, and a controller value of
101, corelates to a volume value of 0.0.
in a moment, i will paste in a little table I've made up, showing some
controller values, and their associated realWorld audio volume levels,
which should help a little in calculating these for your own
applications.
ok so:
7. enter a value of 80 in the beginning field of this insert series of
controlers dialog.
8. tab once and enter a value of 101 in the "end" field.
if you tab twice more, you should see the from and through times that
you want this change to occur over, already inserted for you from the
from and through markers we set before.
9. hit enter to accept.
10. open up the event view for our midi track, and check that you can
see all the controlers from 80 through 101, in the event view, which
should be there if all has gone well so far.
now, we're not at the end yet, because remember, what we've done is to
insert a bunch of midi controller messages, on a midi track that's got
nothing whatever to do with the audio track we really wanna effect here.
11. now because of another stupid thing sonar has broken that used to
work in cakewalk pro-audio 9, when working with midi events like this,
no longer at present, in sonar 2.2, does the event that's actually
sitting at the time of the through marker, get included in any edit
operations you may wanna do.
Because of this, the "through" marker, should really be called a "to,"
marker, acording to their own help files! and they're jolly well right!
grrrrr!
m... yes, i've told them about this, and hopefully they'll fix it back
again soon.
so, because of this very silly change from pro audio 9 days,
to make sure our last controller event of 101 is included in our
next two editing operations, we must hit shift+f9 to open our
from/through times dialog, tab once, and hit shift+numpad plus key, so
that our through marker now reads, 23:01:001, instead of 23:01:000,
which is where our last controller event is.
i.e. we've gotta set the through marker one tick past the last event we
wanna include! grrrrrr.
12. now, hit alt+e, for edit menu, then up arrow once, till you hear,
"convert midi to shapes",
and hit enter.
or simply press V from the menu.
Now I dunno who coded this box up, but, obviusly not a vip keyboard
user. and the new dudes aren't paying as much attention to how the
other boxes are coded i'm finding, because there's a few funny anomlies
in some of these newer boxes.
anyway, focus is on ok when you first enter this box, instead of being
on the first useful field you could alter. so tab past the cancel button
till you get to the first field of use which jaws identifies as a combo
box and doesn't tell you the field name, which is actually type.
if it has control in it, then leave it alone and tab to the next field.
jaws does identify this edit combo box as value. so now:
13. either arrow down till you hear 7 volume, or simply type 7 in this
edit combo box.
14. if you tab once more you should hear, "all channels," that's fine
for now, tab one more time and hit enter on the ok button.
now, for some totally weird reason I can't understand, there will now be
two strange things happen.
A.) you will get chucked out of your event view where you were, and
where you'd prefer to remain so you can check that these controller
events really have been converted to shape events, and
B.) even though pressing your read selected tracks command still reports
that your midi track you've been working on is selected, pressing the
control+c key for copying these events, for this is what we're gunna do
next, yields no joy at all.
you have to unselect, then reselect, the midi track, with two presses of
the comma key, before the copy or cut command, either is fine but I
prefer copying for reasons i'll go into later,
will work.
but first, let's just check that the command has workd properly, and has
resulted in at least one shape event turning up on our midi track in
place of our controller events.
so:
15. reopen your event view, being sure to be focused only on the midi
track which is selected, and hit the letter D, to make sure you're
displaying everything that *is* actually there to see.
tip: if you aren't careful in sonar, you can get a situation where you
might
be actually focused on a different track than the one which is actually
deeply "selected", i.e. being focused on a track, is not the same thing
as selecting a track, just like being focused on a word in your word
processor, isn't the same thing as that word being actualy selected for
an edit command of some kind.
if this is the case, you may find that when you open your event view,
you may find events in there that you don't expect, and if you listen
closely to your title bar, you may hear sonar say, "blah blah blah,
event list multiple tracks," instead of just the single track you wanted
to be
visible in your event view.
... goodness knows why sonar can't be smart enough to actually tell you
in the title bar, which actual trakcs via their track numbers or names,
it's displaying in event view when this occurs,
but such is currently the case.
ok so let's assume now you're looking only at the midi track you did the
last convert midi to shapes command on.
16. now in this example, we made a very linear series of controllers,
over a very uniform time, one measure in length.
what you should see now though, is not 21 shape events as you had with
your controller events, and as one might expect,
but only one shape event.
Let's look at the parameters of this one shape event.
it should have a data value of 0.63-0.80, (showing that it's gunna
change the volume level from about -4.9 DB to 0.0 DB),
it should have a further parameter to the right of this, which denotes
it as a linear type of shape event.
and lastly, if you move one further parameter to the right,
you should find it has a duration of 4 000, or if you like 4 beats and
0 ticks.
that's the length of time over which the curve or change, will take
place.
now there are 4 differtn types of shape events, which denote the type of
curve they represent.
linear, as we've got here, slow, fast, and jump.
I'm not gunna go into these here, but just to let you know.
if you look at your snapshot shape events, you'll notice that they are
the "fast" type of shape event, sometimes mine were Jump for reasons I
haven't figured out quite yet, and they have a duration of 0.
I've seen others which have a duration of 1 tick and so on.
let's leave that for the moemtn.
ok so now hang on, breathe in deeply, we're nearly there!
17. check your from and through markers are still set to 22:01;000 and
23:01:001, as they should be still from before, by queerying them with
control+shift+f7 and control+shift+f8.
try pressing control+c to activate copy command, but if this doesn't
work, see above, then swing back to track view, and reselect this midi
track, and then try again. It should work after doing this.
now because there's no other events in here, or there shouldn't be,
track bus automation should be the firrst field in the copy dialog box,
you want this to be checked. tab about to make sure you're not being
asked to confirm
whether you wanna copy anything else, like key changes, or tempo changes
or whatever,
make sure everything else is unchecked if there is anything else listed
in here,
and hit enter to copy that one shape event, lasting that time frame, to
the clipboard.
18. now move to the audio track, trakc 4 in our example, hit f7 to
absolutely be sure your now time is set to the place you want it to be,
the same as your from time, 22:01:000.
tip: you can double check this by hitting control+shift+f6 if using jaws
free scripts.
now invoke the paste dialog box with control+v.
now ok, ears up because here's another trap. Whoever redesigned this
paste
box after shape events started to get included into sonar,
and the event filter box actually, didn't take the time and trouble to
ensure that things ended up in a good intuitive tab order, nor provide a
underlined shortcut key for the track bus automation field either,
like would've been more optimal.
additionally, this may not even appear in this dialog box, unless the
advanced button is pressed. I'd strongly suggest just leaving this
button pressed all the time, you pretty well always wanna have access to
all the options in here in my view.
so if it's not already, i.e. if you tab around this whole box and don't
see, track bus automation anywhere, then hit alt+a to activate the
advanced button, and try again.
the track bus automation field, which we wanna make sure is checked, is
actually one shift tab back, from the "starting at time", field, which
gains focus on initial entry into this dialog box.
so don't think it's not there if you forward tab and get to ok then
cancel. as I say, it wasn't coded up in a nice tab order which is why
it's ended up in this very easy to miss non-optimal spot.
double check the following paste items:
a.) that your starting time is what you expect, 22:01:000;
B.) that your repetitions field has a value of only 1,
C.) that your starting track is the audio track you wanna paste the
shape event into;
D.) that "link to original clips is, not, checked.;
E.)that in the "what to do with existing material field" which probably
won't get spoken, that the,blend old and new, radio button is checked;
F.) that "paste as new clips", is checked.
G.) tabbing past ok cancel and help, make sure that the most important
one here for us, track bus automation, is checked.
and after confirming all these, most of which will be defaultly
correctly filled in hopefully:
19. hit enter to complete the paste operation.
wammo! finally, ... finally, you *should,* have your result, a volume
change over time, inserted with no external hardware controller.
play back your project, and see if you hear the change in level. move
to bar 22, and look at the value of your volume parameter as well in the
track view.
hopefully it should show a value of around -4.9, at the place where your
controller value of 80, is at work, hit space to play a little, then
recheck your volume value. you should see it tracking the change which
you should be hearing in audio, rising through the negative values, till
after beginning of bar 23, it should read 0.0.
now this still isn't optimal, because you can't edit the shape or value
or duration or even starting time of shape events in event view yet.
you can only delete them from the event view at present.
because of this severely non-optimal lack of editing of these shape
events in the event view,
if you find it's not quite what you wanted, you need to undo the last
two
commands, i.e. the paste command, and the "convert midi to shapes",
command, go back into your event view of the midi track where those
controller events still should be, and mess with/edit the values, or
time placements of those controller events, and then retrace your steps
of converting
midi to shapes, copying the results out, and pasting them back into your
audio traks.
ok now here's an incomplete little table I made up, after experimenting
and finding which controller values equated to which volume DB levels
which might help you in doing the above stuff:
80, = -4.9.
85, = -3.7.
90, = -2.5.
95, = -1.4.
100, =-0.2.
101, =0.0.
103, = 0.5.
105, = 0.9.
110, = 2.1.
115, =3.2.
120, = 4.4.
125, = 5.6.
127, = 6.0.
wow this was a really long process eh. but It was good for me to find
this out for myself, and I hope it helps others as well.
Geoff Chapman
Double Vision Productions
ok her'es a much smaller part 2 bout vips sonar and key bindings and
other stuff.
before I talk about key bindings thogh, i do wanna mention one more
thing distinctly relevant to working successfully with automation.
there's these two modes in sonar, envelope mode and offset mode.
and there's a tool bar button, and actually a hotkey, the plain
letter
o, which activates this toggle.
until a couple hours ago, i thought wwe had absolutely no way of
knowing, which mode was currently active, but, ... in the good old help
in sonar, i have found something which is a bit salvationary for us
vips, because if you're in the wrong mode, like if you're in offset
mode, changes you make to your controls, are simply offsets, of whatever
automation you've got going in your evenlopes, i.e. the controls don't
track along with changes in your levels or parameters or whatever.
as I mentioned before, this is one of about 4 tools in sonar, which jaws
cannot uniquely identify to label separately as one or the other.
fortunately, the clue I've discovered is, that if you see a + (plus),
sign next to words like vol+ pan+ in track view, this means that you've
got offset mode enabled.
hit O to toggle back to envelope mode.
i know i know, single letter hotkkeys are way bettter than nothing, but,
oh so easy to bump inadvertently, and be places you didn't wanna be,
with no feedback that you're there!
now I'll just mention here a bit about keybindings dialog since I
believe assignments in here to be very helpful for speeding up
productivity for us.
well, ahem, having said that,
the thing about the current key bindings dialog in sonar is, ... I've
got absolutely no idea why, but, somehow it seems to me this has been
incredibly broken in UI functionality, when compared to the one in
cakewalk pro audio 9!
Gord perhaps you can confirm for me whether i'm dreaming here or what,
but, ...
... ok well hang on, first of all, when you first go in here by alt+o,
then k for keybindings, either tab 4 times or hit alt+k to jump to the
computer key strokes list box.
here, you arrow up and down and you hear each keystroke they permit,
listed. for the disarm automation tool bar button we were talking about,
i chose control+shift+A. do be careful here not to choose anything which
might already either be assigned to some other sonar function, or to a
jaws script function.
now, if you tab once, you get to another list box which is "supposed" to
contain the functions that you're about to assign to the keystroke
you've chosen in your previous list box., at present you might hear, <no
function assigned>, because we haven't yet assigned one.
However, ... in sonar, the jolly thing just doesn't work!!! at least I
can't get it to.
so now, tab one more time and you'll get to a whole list of sonar
functions you can "bind", or assign if you like, to your chosen
keystorke in the other list box.
many of these functions are in menus, but some of them, like the
functions we're talking about regarding disarming all control's record
automation, and disabling/enabling automation playback, are not, so
they're the good ones to assign here I reckkon.
there are something like 273 functions in here, so it's quite fun
finding the one you want, ... not!
thank Goodness, they've given us first letter and even multi letter jump
navigation to options in here.
so hit d I, or just d three times if you'd rather, and you should get to
"disarm all automation.
now, to bind or assign it to the keystroke you've chosen, hit alt+b, or
tab across to the bind button and hit space on it.
now as I say, what *should* happen, is that a * (star,) should show up
next to the keystroke in your alt+k list box of computer keys, and it
mostly does.
if you don't hear this, you might wanna check that your current
punctuation mode is set to speak stars, or even, put it in your
dictionary so that it will, but not speak other punctuation that you may
not wanna hear etc.
so this does work. but what should also happen and doesn't, (or at least
I've not been able to see it work),
is that in the list box between these two, one shift tab back, you
should see the function you've just assigned, pop up in here so you can
easily check as you arrow down your list box of keys, then when you hear
a star, tab once to the "function" list box, and hear the function
you've assigned to that key.
but ... well it looks real broken to me, because i keep hearing "no
function assigned", when I jolly well know i've just assigned one.
very fortunately, the vic/gord free scripts have very helpfully provided
a magic key stroke, alt+shift+y by default, which will do this job that
sonar's supposed to have done for us, and will read you the function
you've assigned.
so, what you do is, arrow up and down your keystorke list, and when you
hear the star spoken next to a keystroke, just hit alt+shift+y, and
you'll hear the function assigned to it.
it shows up in highlighted colors you see, in the big function list box,
but, ... anywayz, without this, assigning and checking keybinding
asignments currently, would be a real drag.
ok so the enable/disable playback automation, and the disarm automation
controls, are fortunately right next to each other in this huge function
list box, so you may wanna go ahead and asign those to keystrokes.
make sure the option, "save changes for next session," box is checked,
if indeed that's what you want to do.
I've got more that I could say, but, ... i think i'll stop now and await
another day!
happy automating!
geoff c.
end snip.
On 10/19/2018 5:01 AM, Yogan, Yamuna Jivana dasa wrote:
Hi good people,
Some 15 years ago or perhaps even longer, Geoff Chapman, one of our pioneers in the use of Cakewalk back in the days, wrote an extensive article on automating effects parameters linearly over a selection of audio.
If I remember correctly, it included a process of inserting series of controlers onto a midi track over the time selection, then in some way or other, converting those into shapes data and transfering that onto an audio track or bus. Quite a clever idea this was for us who could not work with shapes since those shapes parameters were not visible in the events list view.
Since then I had forgotten the process.
Does anyone perhaps have that article?
I really hope so since it was just so long ago, but such a brilliant article!
I really thought I had it saved but today I had a need for it, looking for it today, I was disappointed to not find it in my special saved articles on Sonar.
Thanks kindly. Hopefully someone will make me lucky today, someone from back in those early good days! May be even Geoff Chapman himself, God bless him!
Yamuna Jivana dasa
