Automation

Automation plays back slow control moves that you draw by hand. Each patch has one automation timeline. The timeline holds 32 curves, called lanes. It plays them against a single playhead, the point that marks where playback has reached.

You draw a curve in a panel at the bottom of the screen. The studio plays that curve back as a control voltage, a signal that adjusts a parameter the way turning a knob would. You send the voltage into your patch through a cable, the same way you connect any two modules. Use it for a filter sweep that opens over a minute, or a level that fades a layer in across a whole take.

The Automation panel

The Automation bar sits along the bottom edge of the screen and stays visible. Click it to open the editor. Click it again to close it.

The transport controls sit in the bar itself: ⏮ rewind, ▶/■ play and stop, ⟳ loop, a position readout showing bar and beat plus the clock time, a BPM field for the timeline's tempo, and a Snap menu for the editing grid. You can start and stop playback with the editor closed.

Banks and lanes

A row of tabs picks which lane you see. The blue tabs on the left choose a bank, A through D. The green tabs on the right choose a lane, 1 through 8. Four banks of eight lanes give 32 lanes in all, named A1 through D8.

A tab that holds a drawn curve appears brighter, so you can see where you have already drawn. The tabs change only which lane is on screen. All 32 lanes play at once, whichever one you are viewing.

Drawing a curve

The editor shows one lane as a curve on a grid. The grid spans ±10 V from bottom to top, with gridlines at ±5 V and a marked centerline at 0 V.

You build the curve from points. Between two points the value moves in a straight line. Before the first point and after the last one, the value holds steady. An empty lane stays at 0 V. Each action below is one undo step.

  • Click empty space to add a point. The point follows your pointer until you release, so you can place it and shape the curve in one motion.
  • Drag a point to move it in time and voltage.
  • Right-click a point to delete it.
  • Right-click empty space and choose Clear All to empty the current lane.
  • Scroll to zoom in or out around the pointer, from fine sub-beat detail out to hundreds of bars per screen.
  • Drag the strip along the bottom to pan, or middle-drag anywhere on the editor. The left edge of the strip is a rewind button.
  • Drag the ruler at the top to move the playhead by hand.

Each lane holds up to 256 points, and the timeline runs up to 86,400 beats, which is 12 hours at 120 BPM. The studio does not record knob movements, and it has no MIDI-learn. The curve you draw is the only source.

Sending a curve into the patch

Automation reaches your modules through cables, like any other signal. The studio provides four modules that read the lanes: Auto A, Auto B, Auto C, and Auto D, in the Modulators category. Each one outputs its bank's eight lanes on CV jacks. Auto A outputs A1 through A8, Auto B outputs B1 through B8, and so on. Each output swings ±10 V.

To automate a filter's cutoff, patch Auto A's A1 output into the filter's FM input. Then raise the filter's FM amount knob, the control that sets how much of the incoming voltage reaches the cutoff. That knob defaults to 0, so it passes none of the voltage. With it raised, lane A1 controls the cutoff.

You can automate any control that has a control-voltage input. A control with no CV input cannot be automated. See Auto A and Patching.

Each Auto module also has two trigger inputs, START and RST, that drive the shared playhead. A trigger is a brief pulse of voltage. A pulse into START starts playback. A pulse into RST rewinds the playhead to the beginning. One playhead serves the whole patch, so a trigger from any module drives it.

Playback and looping

Playback runs once by default. When it reaches the end of your drawn curves, each lane holds its last value and the transport keeps running until the timeline's hard limit of 86,400 beats.

To loop, press ⟳. The loop end snaps to the end of your drawn content, rounded up to a whole bar, or to four bars if you have drawn nothing. Drag the amber handle in the ruler to change the loop length, down to a minimum of one beat. The playhead jumps back to the start when it reaches the loop end. Press ⟳ again to turn the loop off.

Timing

Automation runs in musical time. The ruler shows bars and beats, node positions are stored as beats, and the BPM field in the dock bar sets how fast the beats pass. Changing the BPM stretches the whole song: every node keeps its bar-and-beat position, and the wall-clock timing changes instead. The Snap menu quantizes node edits to a grid, from whole bars down to 1/16 notes; set it to Off for free placement.

Because the timeline runs in beats, your automation can drive your sequencers in lock step. The Song Clock module turns the timeline's beat counter into clock pulses: patch its CLK output into a sequencer and the sequence, the curves, and the loop all move together, exactly in phase. Song Clock also carries the dock's play, stop, and reset as jacks and buttons inside the patch. See Sequencing for the clock family.

The studio saves your curves and the loop point with the patch. It does not save the play state, so a loaded patch always opens stopped.

Tips

  • Patch a Patch Start trigger into an Auto module's START and RST inputs. The timeline then rewinds and plays from the top every time the patch loads. See Patch Start.
  • Draw a slow ramp from 0 V to 5 V over 30 s and patch it into a filter's FM input with the FM amount knob raised. This gives a slow opening sweep across the whole take.
  • An unused lane stays at 0 V, so you only use the lanes you draw. Spread one performance across several lanes, for example cutoff on A1, reverb mix on A2, and master level on A3.
  • Set a short loop of two to four bars so a lane repeats. A repeating lane works as a slow control source that you shape by hand, with steps or zigzags a plain oscillator cannot make.