Dev Log #35 - Block choke and amp envelopes (Patreon)

The new version of the audio engine will have the audio signal of a single track being routed downwards through the lanes with blocks being able to manipulate the dry signal coming from above them in various ways. After the work I did properly implementing the fade-in/fade-out periods at the edges of blocks I realised it was now trivial to take the resulting amplitude curves and generate gate signals.

The term "gate" is a bit overloaded and I think doesn't quite fit with what I made here. Instead I borrowed the term "choke" as is sometimes used in drum machines for the concept of "choke groups".

Choke can be enabled for sampler blocks and meta blocks and when it's turned on the dry signal coming from the lane above will be ducked or entirely gated for the duration of the choke block.

Playing with this I quickly realised it would be interesting to be able to add user-defined fade-in/fade-out periods to the choke block. If you have been following me on Twitter you may have already seen this weird ASR envelope editor that this idea turned into:

Colugo on Twitter: "bizarre envelope https://t.co/8AMZwYc1sG" / Twitter

The curve produced is used as an amplitude envelope for sampler blocks and the exact inverse of this curve is used as the gate for the dry signal. Sampler blocks will still have the normal amp envelopes too. Interestingly with this you can use meta blocks to very quickly do manual sidechaining as some people like to do.

The editor feels sort of natural once you get used to it and can generate some interesting curves but it might be simply too weird for this particular use case. In the future I may swap it out for some different curve editor though it could be reused in other contexts.

The final couple things I want to do for this is have the waveforms respond properly to the amplitude curves as they do with the existing amp envelopes and also add a visual indication of which blocks on the above lanes are being affected by the choke block.

This has been a pretty large digression from the main thing I was working on (the engine rewrite and refactoring). I estimate the next available build is probably still at least month away but will be the biggest update yet. Once the new effect block system is in place I would quite like to re-implement all the existing effects as effect blocks but that will also take a while so the initial build after these new systems are complete might not include all the existing effects.