Visible / Animated LFO actions

[Simbosan]

I've been watching Nick Maxwell's sound design tutorials: http://www.youtube.com/user/oubliettezo ... ture=watch

I've been particularly interested in his use of LFO Midi, M4L device. The power if this is such that it makes me wonder why it took you so long =) But hey, it's here now and it's great. One of the best things about it, maybe THE best is how you can see the modulated parameter move. I can't stress how huge this is.

Consider the Auto filter plugin. You move the filter around by hand, finding the sweet spot, finding the best resonance. You do this visually and aurally at the same time. Then you have to try and reproduce that with the Auto filter LFO. But you can't see exactly what is going on, you can't see it moving left and right so you are never 100% sure what's going on. This means that in lots of cases you are actually better off using the M4L device than Live's own device LFO. Yes, I understand that you can probably calculate the exact parameters, but a) that's pretty long and complicated b) you lack feedback to prove you got it right. You are in effect (haha.. effect!... nevermind) flying blind.

It's so immediately 'right' it feels so very intuitive to see modulated parameters move that I really think Live devices should show the movement. This would just be huge on effects like auto filter, chorus etc. It makes things so immediate, so comprehensible. Brilliant idea if I say so myself =) And therefore I'm probably the 300th person to suggest this.

On the x-y pads you could have a different coloured or partially transparent ghost moving so that you can see the centre point, for numeric value fields it wouldn't be so easy or clean to see original unmodulated values, some design guru can think his way round that one, or just not bother!

You can also add my vote to the 100millionth (no exaggeration, I'm the man most unlikely ever in the whole Universe EVER to fall into the trap of hyperbole!!!!!!!!!) request for built in LFO, firing up M4L adds a fair extra bit of load on the machine, I'm sure Abes can make a leaner more efficient system. E.g. Make all 8 Macro buttons in a group LFO'able via right click interface. Then you can map those anywhere you like. Ooh, I'm on fire!

[Matt_Quinn]

+1.