FabFilter User Forum
Probabilistic XLFO?
One feature I find myself craving often in the Timeless/Saturn/Volcano modulation system is an intuitive way to make things toggle between 2 set values in a probabilistic way.
An example: I want Timeless Wet Level turned off most of the time, but I want a 10% chance on every quarter note for the Wet Level to be turned fully on.
There are unintuitive ways to kinda get close, like making 1 XLFO represent the 2 set values, and another randomizing XLFO move the Phase Offset of the first XLFO, but this takes a lot of fiddling to get into the ballpark that a specialized "XLFO-Probability" or "Probability-Gate" would accomplish in a few seconds, and it has some limitations I am not sure how to get around (like the first XLFO can not have a speed of zero so it also is constantly moving at least at a slow speed).
Is there a more clever way to accomplish my goal?
If not, could you add this to your list of features to consider in the future? As an example of a decent implementation, Unfiltered Audio Lion includes a "Probability Gate" option in its modulation system.
Thank you.
I completely the XLFO section has some major limitations as soon as you deal with randomness. While that was fine when modulating a delay or saturator, this becomes very limiting when modulating an actual synthesizer like Twin 3.
My main grips are:
1. You cannot quantize values as you said. It's common to want to constrain values to a musical scale or to some integers value
Solution: Allow XLFO values to be constrained to some values.
2. You cannot have a random value between 0 and 1
You cannot have a heat beat whose beat is random between 0 and 1.
You either have to use the -1 as the base, which is unnatural because you have to adjust the base value of the target, which sucks because when to continually adjust it as you tweak the amount of modulation
You have to use sliders to compensate but then it either skews the value, or it skews the distribution of the value. And more importantly it gets super confusing very quickly.
Solution: Allow XLFO values to be folded.
3. You cannot shape the distribution of random values. It's pretty common that you don't want the higher values be as frequent as the lower values.
Solution: Allow XLFO values to be expanded or compressed.
Conclusion: I would really encourage you to check the modulation section of Hive 2 by U-He (specifically the rectify, curve and quantize functions). This would make the overall XLFO section much easier to work with when dealing with randomness without making XLFO harder to deal with in simple cases.