Probably with chain selector

[Scottspur]

Hi, I'm using instrument chains to make some automatic patch changes during a live set with a band. I use dummy clips with envelopes to select chains.. it seems to be sort-of working. To be clearer, I have a chain with some various instruments, each having its own chain #, and then in my dummy clip i go to envelopes->Instrument chain->chain select and slide the bar up to the appropriate number.

In all of the tutorials i've looked at, the chain view shows a little orange bar above the instrument that's currently selected. Mine shows the orange bar, but also an orange dot to the right of it, maybe 1 chain away, maybe 2 chains away, and it seems like it plays the instrument that the dot is over. What's up with the dot?!?

Please help!

[NPC]

That is because (most of) the envelopes within clips in session view work in a "relative" fashion. That is, you put (logically before) the chain selector at a certain level, and then specify the percentage of that level that the automation actually selects.
I don't find it very handy, it would be better to have access to the absolute level--whatever, when i used this solution i did set the chain selector to 100 (or 99 cant remember) so the percentage you select in the env points you to an acknowledgeable chain..1 points to 1 2 to 2 and so on..

[NPC]

Forgot to mention that the little green dot you were asking about represents the point in the chain selector actually automated by the envelope!while the orange one the absolute level of the selector--pretty much obviously.
hope it helped..

[Scottspur]

Didn't quite follow the part about you setting the chain selector to 100 so that you could use dummy clips to go to the correct values.

My problem is that I have dummy clips for each song to switch to the right patch (each song is a row), but the set gets reordered regularly so I basically want to have a clip called "piano" and have that switch to the piano whenever its launched. Is this doable?

[Scottspur]

It seems like its working... I think the problem was that I was using the orange bar to manually select a chain, and then when I launched a clip to add 2 or add 1, it went off the chart.. so i guess I should just always leave the orange bar on 0. Does that sound right?

[NPC]

er...yes but i still think you should leave the orange bar not on 0 but on 127 - or, again, 100 as i said. The reason for 100 is simple: since the envelope select the chain number corresponding to a fraction of the orange bar value, if this last one is at 0 then there is no change for all the values of the envelope - that is 33% of 0 is still 0. If you set the orange bar to 127 then when you put the envelope at 33% it selects value 42 of the chain selector (127*0.33=41,91). If, however, you set the orange bar to 100, then a value of 33% of the envelope actually selects the value 33 inside the chain selector. So if you have say the first 10 chains active, then you point to each one of them just by setting the envelope in the clips to 1%,2%,...,10%.
Can't tell if it's clear now...

[agent314]

Yeah, the thing to remember is that with clips in session view, what you're actually doing is modulating the parameter value (aka choosing a percentage of whatever value is set in globally/in Arrangement view), not automating, which is changing the actual parameter value

So if you have an autofilter set at 10khz globally/in Arrangement view and you have dummy clips with envelopes set at 0%, 50%, and 100%, the corresponding values will be 20hz (lowest value the filter goes), 5khz (50% of 10khz) and 10khz (100% of 10khz)

So to get the clips to work effectively for your chain selector, you're going to want to make sure the value is set at 127 globally/in Arrangement view so that the relative position set by the clips will make sense

In Arrangement view you Automate values for a given parameter - you're actually changing the absolute value of the parameter globally

In Session view you Modulate the value that's set in Arrangement view - you're selecting a percentage of the overall value, so it will always be a relative value of the parameter based on what it's set in Arrangement view/globally