Patch timeline

The patch timeline lets you author how a sound changes over a single note as one gesture. Instead of setting up a separate envelope or LFO for each control, you place a few snapshots along the life of the note and set the controls to how you want the sound to be at each point. The synth fills in the movement between them.

This is how most living patches actually work: the sound starts one way, and by half a second it has morphed somewhere else. The oscillators cross over, the filter breathes open, the detune spreads. The timeline is one place to shape all of that at once.

The bar

The timeline bar sits along the bottom of the editor and stays visible on every tab, so you can shape the morph while looking at any control. It shows the line of the note from start to end, a marker for each snapshot, a scrub cursor, the length of the timeline, and buttons to add and remove snapshots.

A patch with fewer than two snapshots is static and behaves exactly as the synth always has. The morph only starts once a second snapshot gives it something to move between.

Snapshots

A snapshot is a moment in the note with a value remembered for every morphable control. Press the plus button to drop a snapshot at the cursor. The first one captures the patch as it stands now. Each later one is taken from the state the morph already has at that moment, so adding it changes nothing until you edit it.

Click a marker to select that snapshot. Its values are loaded onto the knobs, so every page now shows the sound as it is at that point in the note. Turn any morphable knob and the change is written into the selected snapshot. Move between snapshots and set each to taste; the synth glides between them as the note plays.

Drag a marker along the bar to move a snapshot in time. Press the x button to remove the selected one.

Length

The number on the right is the length of the timeline in seconds, the window the morph plays out over. Drag it up to make the note's evolution slower and broader, down to make it quicker. After the end of the window the last snapshot holds, so a long held note settles on its final scene.

Scrubbing

Drag along the bar, away from a marker, to scrub. The knobs follow the cursor and show the sound exactly as it is at that instant, blended between the surrounding snapshots. This is a preview: scrubbing does not change the patch, it lets you watch the morph and find the moment a sound turns.

What morphs

The timeline moves the continuous oscillator and filter controls, the ones that carry most of a sound's movement:

• Each oscillator's level, tune, semitone, unison detune and wavetable position.
• The sub and noise levels, and the noise filter frequency.
• Both filters' cutoff, resonance and drive.

Structural choices stay fixed for the whole note: the oscillator mode, the filter type, the routing, the warp mode. The timeline shapes how a sound moves, not what kind of sound it is.

The morph sets the starting value of each control for the note. Your modulation still applies on top, so a snapshot patch can also be moved by LFOs, envelopes and the mod matrix. Where the timeline drives a control, it takes over that control's base for the note.

A first morph

To hear the idea, make one oscillator hand over to another across a note:

• Turn Osc 1 and Osc 2 both up.
• Add a snapshot at the start. Select it and turn Osc 2 down to silence.
• Add a snapshot near half a second. Select it, turn Osc 1 down to silence and Osc 2 back up. Open the filter a little more here too.

Hold a note. Osc 1 carries the attack, then fades as Osc 2 swells in and the filter breathes open. Scrub the bar to watch the handover and find the moment the sound changes hands.