Disruptor and automation clips

Automation as clips you move, copy and loop, and one lane above them all that can reach anything.

Automation lanes

Every track owns an automation lane, hidden until you show it. A lane is a grid of named rows, one per control or send amount it targets. On a row you place triggers, and each trigger holds a curve that plays for exactly the trigger's span. When it ends, the control goes back to its panel value. Triggers live in patterns, and patterns are placed on the timeline with ordinary clips, so automation loops, moves, copies and splits the way notes do. A clip that spans the whole movement is the old envelope; a clip that spans one bar is a gesture.

A track's automation lane below it, with trigger clips on the timeline — A lane's automation lane, shown with the A button on the lane head. Each clip places a pattern of triggers.

The Disruptor

The Disruptor is one lane for the whole movement, pinned as a ruler above the tracks. Its rows work the same way, but each row can target any control on any track, group, send bus, side effect lane or the master, and one row can target several. It is for events: for these four bars, open the filter on the lead, drop the reverb send on the drums, and pull the master down a touch, then let everything return. A single Bypass switch turns it off. Where the Disruptor overlaps a track's own automation on the same control, it wins, and the overlapped span wears the Disruptor's colour so you can see that it did.

A trigger's graph popover open over the Disruptor pattern: the curve the control follows for the trigger's span — A trigger's graph. Click a trigger and its curve opens: what the control does across the trigger's span, with the range, snap and loop settings below it.