Cubase 12: FX Modulator Risers And Drops

 By John Walden

FX Modulator’s Volume module makes it easy to transform almost any source sound into a riser or decaying hit/drop.

Cubase’s FX Modulator makes it easy to design ear‑catching riser and drop effects.

Sound‑design elements such as risers, hits and drops are used in all sorts of musical contexts to highlight a specific point in an arrangement, such as a musical transition. Risers (with or without a tail) constitute volume swells into an impact/transition, while drops can be thought of as a kind of impact sound but with an added pitch drop element. There are, of course, lots of excellent commercial sample packs or virtual instruments that can supply these sorts of sounds, but rolling your own can both be quicker (you don’t haver to trawl through a million samples) and deliver a better, unique result. Users of Cubase 12 (Artist or Pro) can use the new FX Modulator plug‑in to do this, so let’s see how it rises to the occasion!

Because FX Modulator provides plenty of options for controlling the volume, timbre change and pitch (amongst other things) of a sound, we don’t necessarily need to start with a source sound that contains any of these features. For the example below, and the audio files that accompany the workshop on the SOS website (https://sosm.ag/cubase0223), I started with a couple of sustained presets from Cubase’s Padshop synth. I deliberately picked sounds with a broad frequency spectrum and then shortened the attack and release times of the amplifier envelope. I also bypassed any delay or reverb effects — because I wanted it to be FX Modulator which controlled the start and end/decay portions of my riser and drop effects.

Rise & Shine

For our purposes, there are two key features of FX Modulator. First, amongst its various effects modules are Volume, Filter and Pitch, the three main tools we can use for our DIY sound design (the ‘FX’ bit). Second, each of the effects modules lets you modulate a parameter (or two) over a user‑selected time base (for example, one beat, one bar; the ‘Modulator’ bit).

Let’s start simply, using just the Volume module to create two‑bar riser effect. As shown in the first screen, the basic configuration is very straightforward, but some details are worth noting. First, I’ve defined my own volume modulation curve and saved it into one of the user banks. The curve starts from zero volume, rises to a peak after two bars, and then there’s a rapid drop in back to zero (giving a short ‘tail’ to the sound, the length of which can easily be adjusted by changing the curve). For me to have the option for this tail setting, I needed to set the Time control to four bars (4/1), even though I want my riser itself to only last two bars.

MIDI triggering from an additional MIDI track provides precise control over the timing of your modulation curve.

Second, in the bottom‑most Trigger panel I’ve enabled MIDI triggering and selected the 1 Cycle mode. This means that the volume modulation envelope will only start running when FX Modulator receives a MIDI trigger note (any note; the pitch doesn’t matter). Once triggered, it will complete a single pass through its timeline (four bars long in this case) before stopping. This style of triggering requires an extra step, which is described below, but it’s more precise than using the internal side‑chain option, which relies on the input signal passing a defined threshold level before triggering occurs.

Given that this is a two‑bar riser, we need to trigger both Padshop and FX Modulator exactly two bars ahead of when that peak is required..

That extra step? We need a second MIDI track containing our MIDI ‘trigger’ notes, and with its MIDI Output Routing set to the MIDI in of our FX Modulator plug‑in — this routing can be set up in the MIDI track’s Inspector panel. Given that this is a two‑bar riser, we need to trigger both Padshop and FX Modulator (from the MIDI trigger track) exactly two bars ahead of when that peak is required. For example, if I wanted the peak to hit at the end of bar 4, I’d place a single note on my Padshop track at the exact start of bar 3 and extended the note beyond the start of bar 5 (to allow for that aforementioned short tail to be heard). Having created the Padshop MIDI clip, I can copy it to the MIDI trigger track; it will then trigger the Volume module’s modulation envelope at exactly the same time as Padshop starts to play. The result? The Padshop sound gradually rises in level over two bars, hits its peak at the end of bar 4, and then quickly tails off at the start of bar 5. And, by using different MIDI pitches with Padshop, you can produce slightly different riser sounds each time you want to use it.

You can create a similar riser‑style effect using the Filter module. The configuration can be identical to that for the Volume module, but with the gradually rising modulation curve controlling the cutoff frequency of (for example) a low‑pass 12dB/octave filter. The sound will still start at a low volume because the initial low cutoff setting does not let much of the sound get past the filter. However, over the two‑bar build, the filter gradually opens, making the sound grow both louder and brighter. Adjust the frequency value at the peak of the modulation curve to change the intensity of the effect; for example, make the filter peak at 15 rather than 20 kHz.

Hit The Drop

You can create all sorts of drop‑style effects using a combination of the Pitch and Volume modules.

I know what you’re thinking... Wouldn’t it be nice to build a riser that combines both the Volume and Filter modules? You can do that but, as I’ll demonstrate by building a drop sound (which does require two modules to be combined; Pitch and Volume), an extra step is involved if you wish to trigger two modulation curves and keep them in sync. This is due to a limitation within the plug‑in’s MIDI trigger system; within any instance of FX Modulator, the MIDI trigger option can only be active for one module at a time.

While it would be great to see Steinberg address this at some stage, we needn’t wait for that since there’s an uncomplicated workaround. For our drop effect, insert two instances of FX Modulator on the Padshop track. The first instance uses the Pitch module, while the second uses the Volume module. Imagine we want our pitch drop to last one bar. We set the Time for both instances to 2/1 (two bars; again, longer than the drop itself, so as to avoid the module curves cycling back to their starting values right at the end of the one‑bar effect, which could result in audible oddities!). We can then create pitch and volume modulation curves to taste over the first bar, with the volume modulation reaching zero at the end of bar 1, and remaining at zero until the end of bar 2.

Finally, instead of just one MIDI trigger track (using the same approach as for our riser), you create two, each pointing at a different FX Modulator instance. It might look a little clunky (and if that bothers you there’s a slightly more elegant/complex solution using MIDI Sends from a single MIDI ‘trigger’ track) but it’s simple and it’s effective.

Time For Change

As mentioned above, playing different notes with our Padshop source can provide a welcome sense of variation when we want to use the DIY riser or drop at multiple points in a single project. But another useful variation is simply to change the length of the effect. For example, instead of the one‑bar drop described above, you could go for a shorter half‑bar version. While you could obviously replicate the above setups with additional Padshop and MIDI trigger tracks, a more efficient option is simply to automate changes to the Time setting of your FX Modulator instances.

By automating the Time parameter within FX Modulator, you can change the length of your DIY riser or drop effect at different points within your project.

The most straightforward way to do this is to select the Padshop track containing your FX Modulator instances, open an instance of FX Modulator (you can do each in turn) and enable the Write Automation button. Start playback, then use your mouse to change the Time value, which will automatically create an automation lane for that parameter. You can then edit the automation curve manually to place the desired changes in the Time parameter at the appropriate points. In this example, if we wanted to create a half‑bar riser/drop, we’d set the Time parameter to one bar (four beats). The only other thing we need to do is change the length of the MIDI notes used to get Padshop to play and to trigger the modulation curves to 1.5 bars (six beats; as with the earlier example, slightly longer than the sound effect we are trying to create). Provided you enable the Read Automation button for these automation lanes, you can now trigger as many different lengths of your riser or drop as your project requires.

Published February 2023

PAINTVOX "Oscillodriver (Play the KORG DSN-12) " Performs live in Japan!

Cubase: How To Create An Envelope Follower

By John Walden

Cubase doesn’t include an envelope follower — but with a little creative routing you can achieve much the same thing.

If you like to get creative with your effects, an ‘envelope follower’ opens up some interesting possibilities. This allows you to use the volume of an incoming audio signal to modulate one or more parameters of an effect. One fairly straightforward (but potentially very useful) application might be to add more overdrive/distortion to louder sections of a bass guitar part than to quieter ones, an effect which can add that extra bit of excitement to a bass without overcooking the levels. The same approach could be used to add an aggressive edge to a lead vocal at certain times.

I’d love to see Steinberg add just such an envelope follower function to the FX Modulator plug‑in. But while we don’t have that yet, a little creative audio routing can help you achieve a similar result — and that’s what I’ll be exploring in this month’s workshop. On the SOS website (sosm.ag/cubase-0423) you can find a few audio examples of the effects described below.

Route Planner

Screen 1: Although the approach described here uses four channels in the MixConsole, the routing involved really isn’t complicated.Let’s start with the electric bass ‘more overdrive when the bass is louder’ example. There are actually a number of ways this might be implemented, including simply configuring the required overdrive/distortion effect as an FX Channel, routing a send from your bass source track, and then manually automating the blend between the clean and overdriven signals to add more overdrive at the required spots along the timeline. But if a more automatic solution in the style of an envelope follower is wanted, the audio routing setup you can see in the first screenshot provides another option (Screen 1).

I’ve used four channels to do this, but hopefully the routing involved is still pretty easy to follow. On the left, the Bass Org audio track contains the original clean bass guitar recording. Next to this is an FX Channel named Bass Overdrive FX, with an instance of DaTube inserted. We then have two Group Channels: Bass Bus Clean and Bass Bus Blend. The output of Bass Org is routed to Bass Bus Clean, but also has a Send routed to Bass Overdrive FX. The outputs of both Bass Bus Clean and Bass Overdrive FX are then routed to Bass Bus Blend, where the clean and overdriven parts of the sound are recombined before being passed on to the project’s stereo master bus.

Expand On That

So how does this routing configuration then let us perform our overdrive trick? Well, if we insert a dynamics plug‑in prior to DaTube on the Bass Overdrive FX channel, we can modify the level of the input signal that reaches DaTube based on the level/dynamics of that input signal. For example, if we set up a standard Compressor instance here to bring down the louder sections (and don’t apply makeup gain!), less of the bass signal will reach DaTube at those times, so there’ll be less overdrive in our final blend. This would be the opposite of what we’re trying to achieve, though! So instead we’ll use the Expander plug‑in (shown in the screenshot).

Placing Expander before our parallel overdrive allows us to exaggerate the dynamics within the bass performance.

With a downward expander such as this, when the signal is below the threshold it’s turned down by an amount determined by the ratio, while signals above the threshold are left untouched. The result is that the dynamic range of the signal is increased, or ‘expanded’ — hence the name of this processor. Placing Expander before our parallel overdrive, then, allows us to exaggerate the dynamics within the bass performance, so that when the bass is played more softly less of the signal reaches DaTube. This results is less distortion during the quieter parts and, relatively, more distortion in the louder passages.

It’s worth noting that this is not exactly what you might achieve with a volume‑based envelope shaper, because in that case, the resulting envelope could be used to modulate a specific parameter (for example, the Drive control) of the target plug‑in, rather than just modulating the send level. But in the absence of an actual envelope shaper tool, it’s a very useful alternative — and, in this case at least, can produce a very similar sort of result. Screen 2 shows the Expander settings I used for this example, but you can experiment with different threshold and ratio settings to finesse the dynamics of the overdriven signal.

Screen 2: Expander determines how much signal reaches DaTube, while adding Gate and StudioEQ into the side‑chain gives you further ways to shape the effect.

More Options

If you would like to ensure that no overdrive at all is applied to the lowest‑level parts of your bass guitar signal, you can simply place a Gate plug‑in before Expander. In the screenshot example, I’ve set fast attack, hold and release settings, but you should feel free to experiment. The most important parameter is Gate’s threshold. When the signal exceeds the threshold level, signal passes to Expander to give us the same effect as described above. But when the signal falls below the threshold, no signal will be passed to the Expander (or onwards to DaTube), so there will be no overdrive effect.

You can add further flexibility by placing an EQ plug‑in after your overdrive/distortion effect. In this case, I’ve used an instance of Cubase’s stock StudioEQ. Three bands are active, with low‑end and high‑end cuts applied and a peaking filter (band 2), centred around 2000Hz, used to add gain. This means that the output from this track (the overdriven version of our bass) is focused on the mid/upper‑mid frequencies. The idea here is to add a little high‑end definition to the overall bass sound, but leave the bass’ low end sounding clean, clear and free from distortion. This is, of course, a matter of taste and musical context, and you could try different settings, but it can certainly be a useful option to further tailor/control the final effect.

Level Headed

In all the examples I’ve outlined so far, both the clean (Bass Org) and overdriven (Bass Overdrive FX) components are combined at the Bass Bus Blend channel to create our ‘composite’ bass sound. Electric bass is usually compressed (in most genres, anyway), and a final dash of compression can be added here to even things out a little. In Screen 3, you can see an instance of Compressor inserted on this Bass Bus Blend channel, and this might be all that’s required. But do keep in mind that more of the overdrive element is added as the clean bass signal itself gets louder. When active, our ‘dynamic’ overdrive might, therefore, deliver a noticeable jump in overall level for our Bass Bus Blend compressor to deal with.

Screen 3: With the routing described in the main text, you can also choose to ‘duck’ a clean bass signal when the overdriven component is at its loudest.

Our Bass Bus Clean track, in which the clean bass signal is passed through on its way to the Bass Bus Blend channel, offers a way to tame those potential jumps in overall level. In this case, I’ve achieved that by placing a compressor on the Bass Bus Clean channel. It is responding to an external side‑chain signal, taken from the Bass Overdrive FX channel. This way, when the overdriven signal increases in level, this compressor reduces the level of the clean signal but only after the clean signal has itself triggered the overdrive. The result is a more even level when the clean‑plus‑overdriven blend arrives at the Bass Bus Blend channel — the compression settings allow you to finesse this to achieve the desired result.

One extra detail is worth consideration. Having used StudioEQ to frequency‑limit the overdrive (in this case, within the 500‑5000 Hz range), the additional level this overdrive component adds is only within the frequency range. However, the side‑chain‑driven compressor on the Bass Bus Clean channel applies compression across the full frequency range of the clean bass signal. As a consequence, louder sections of overdrive centred at 2000Hz may well trigger gain reductions above and below this, and this risks robbing the composite sound of its low‑end solidity. You can replace the Compressor instance on the Bass bus Clean channel with Cubase Pro’s Frequency 2 (users of other versions can use another dynamic EQ plug‑in) and trigger a dynamic band to ‘compress’ just the required frequencies in the clean signal, to match those frequencies that are added in the overdriven channel. Hey presto! Your low end will remain intact.

And There’s More...

Of course, you don’t have to restrict this kind of experimentation to just bass. For example, the same trick can also be quite effective on a lead vocal, adding some grit and a good dollop of attitude to the louder sections of a performance; I included an example of this in the online audio clips. Equally, the same approach can be used with different effects types. For example, you could have more flanger on your guitar as it gets louder. If you swap out the Expander for an instance of Compressor, you can also reverse the process and get more of an effect in the quieter parts of a performance (more reverb on the quieter sections of a piano part, perhaps?). And, finally, don’t be scared to try these effects on the input signal as you play — you can have great fun adjusting your playing dynamics to hit the effect ‘sweet spot’. While I’d love Steinberg to add an envelope follower into the Cubase feature list, there’s already plenty of fun to be had with this kind of creative audio routing. Enjoy!   

Published April 2023

Korg DSN-12 Analog-Style Creation Tool for Nintendo 3DS

Cubase 12 Drum Processing With Raiser

By John Walden

Raiser provides powerful limiting options with a very flexible release section.

With its Raiser plug‑in, Cubase Pro can raise hell with your drum sounds!

For users of Cubase Pro, one of the more intriguing additions bundled with v12 was the Raiser plug‑in, which brought us some new limiting options. Indeed, Raiser has a number of interesting features. For one thing, the real‑time graphic display provides very clear visual feedback on changes to the overall waveform due to the limiting and the amount of peak gain reduction that is occurring. Also, the DIC (Detect Intersample Clipping) button ensures your peak signal level does not exceed the maximum output level (even between samples) specified by the Ceiling control. And engaging the Compare switch allows you to hear the processed waveform (with the limiting applied) but at a volume that’s comparable with that of the unprocessed (bypassed) signal, making it easier to judge whether the limiting is introducing undesirable artefacts.

Sweet Release!

The various release modes allow you to customise the release behaviour in some interesting ways.However, arguably Raiser’s key feature is its release section. Operation is pretty intuitive: as you raise the input gain the signal level increases and, eventually, you’ll push the peaks up against the ceiling, thus triggering limiting. But the release controls provide some very cool options to configure the limiter’s behaviour and can strongly influence the perceived loudness you’re able to achieve. This includes the ability to configure very fast release times, which means there’s lots of potential when dealing with sounds that have a strong transient element, such as drums.

There are two elements to the fast release behaviour. First, you can select different release modes (the options are shown in one of the screenshots), and these combine with the release time knob to control the overall release behaviour. Second, a Fast button lets you toggle on/off an initial, very fast release phase that occurs before that defined by the main release control. Steinberg’s documentation suggests this be engaged for percussive material, and in all that follows I’m going to assume that this is turned on. So, if you’d like to make your drums loud and proud, let’s explore just how far Raiser can take them.

Getting Your Bearings

As with any dynamics processing on drums, there are multiple points at which you can insert Raiser in your signal chain. Perhaps the most dramatic impact on your overall drum sound comes from using Raiser on your drum bus or, for parallel processing, as a send effect from your drum bus. However, it makes a lot of sense to start by getting yourself accustomed to the controls, and processing a single drum such as a kick or snare will make it easier to appreciate both what the various controls are doing to your signal, and how they interact.

A composite screenshot showing how varying the gain and release time result in both increases in average loudness and also a change in the waveform shape for individual drum hits. See the main text for an explanation of each panel.In the first of the audio examples that accompany this workshop (https://sosm.ag/cubase-0523) I’ve done exactly that, and panel A of the final screenshot demonstrates the effect on five snare hits. The release time was constant (30ms using Restricted Max mode) but the gain varies from 0dB (the first hit) up to 18dB (the last hit). Initially, adjusting the gain control simply increases both the peak and average loudness of the individual drum. However, once your peaks hit the ceiling, limiting kicks in, and any further increase in gain produces average loudness increases without any further peak level increases. For each individual drum hit, you can see the difference between the original waveform (light blue) and the waveform after limiting is applied (darker blue). You can, of course, use this processing to raise the perceived loudness of the drum (making it seem more prominent in the mix) while retaining control over its peak level. However, as with any limiter, if you add more than a few dB of perceived level in this way, you might well start to negatively impact the character of the sound, so you have to listen carefully.

Panel B shows a composite of a similar set of five hits but this time I’ve kept the gain fixed (at a whopping 18dB!) and changed the release time from 500ms (first hit) to 5ms (last hit). Again, you can clearly see the changes this induces on the waveforms. There are a number of key takeaways. First, longer release times can produce a very natural‑sounding result, but too long and the release from one hit won’t be completed before the next hit, and it can therefore change the latter’s sound and impact; your release time setting may, therefore, be influenced by the tempo of the performance and the frequency with which the drum is hit. Thankfully, Raiser’s waveform/gain‑reduction display makes this easy to visualise, so it’s easy to configure on a single drum channel, but as I’ll explain shortly, where Raiser is being used on a bus you may need a pretty fast release to allow a full release between every drum/cymbal strike.

Second, the higher the gain settings and the faster the release times, the greater the shift in emphasis from the transient to the ‘tail’ of the sound, something that’s made obvious by the changes in the waveform. For the snare used in the audio example, this means you gradually hear a shift away from the initial ‘crack’ and into the ‘rattle’ of the snares themselves. If you audition the audio examples, you’ll also hear a resonance of the drum (which you may or may not like) become more noticeable. There’s no right or wrong here; you just need to be aware in order to have control. You can think of it as an additional creative option to customise the sound of your drums after the fact!

Third, and perhaps most significantly, Raiser lets you achieve some considerable increases in average loudness before these sorts of audio artefacts become really obvious. With instances of Raiser placed on each individual drum channel of a full drum mix, the second audio example illustrates this pretty well. Your mileage may vary but, to my ears at least, because each limiter is only having to manage a single drum sound, you can achieve some considerable increases in average level before the overall drum mix starts to take on a ‘slightly trashy’ flavour.

Taking The Bus

Whether for convenience or simplicity, or out of necessity (working with stereo drum loops?), you might prefer to use a single instance of Raiser on a stereo drum mix/bus or as a parallel send effect. So how does it fare in this role? I’ve included a couple of audio examples to illustrate this approach, each of which runs through the same four‑bar drum performance a number of times, using gradually more extreme gain and release time settings. However, panels C, D and E of the final screenshot show how the release time may need to be shorter when Raiser is placed on a bus. In each case, gain is set to 12dB but the release time varies: 300ms (A), 10ms (B) and 2ms (C).

...a fast release, and the combination of the Fast switch and the Restricted Max mode is a good starting point; this allows you to get any limiting out of the way quickly between individual drum hits.

Again, there are some key takeaways. First, and particularly true for busier or more up‑tempo drum performances, you need to be using Raiser’s options for a fast release (for example, a sub‑10ms release time), and the combination of the Fast switch and the Restricted Max mode is a good starting point; this allows you to get any limiting out of the way quickly between individual drum hits. Second, the converse can also be true; slower release times (50ms and longer) can run the risk of robbing some energy from the performance (transients might get caught up in limiting triggered by the previous hit, as in C) despite any increase in level. Third, as long as you’re content with modest increases in average loudness, you can achieve a surprisingly natural‑sounding end result.

Fourth, if you do choose to push things a little harder, the sound can begin to get a bit ‘gungy’ (for example, open hi‑hats, ride and crash cymbals can become very splashy). But while this may not sound so natural, in the right musical context it may provide just the character you require. Finally, this grungy element is incredibly easy to dial in if Raiser is used as a send effect rather than being inserted on the drum bus, as you can drive Raiser as hard as you like, then alter the blend to taste by automating the fader levels on the (clean) drum bus and (trashy) send track for different sections of your song.

It’s worth me pointing out that while I’ve focused on acoustic drums in these examples, precisely the same principles apply with electronic drums — though, depending on the musical genre, you may find that you feel rather less constrained about keeping things ‘natural’. With that thought, I’ll leave you to raise hell with Raiser!   

Published May 2023

Korg SDD-3000 PEDAL Introduction & Overview

Cubase's MIDI Plug-ins Revisited

By John Walden

With this combination of Cubase’s stock MIDI plug‑ins, you can easily add variety and randomisation to your melodies.

They’ve been with us for years — but you really shouldn’t overlook what Cubase’s MIDI plug‑ins have to offer!

Both the Pro and Artist versions of Cubase ship with a collection of 18 MIDI plug‑ins, spanning creative, corrective and utility functions. They can be placed onto any MIDI or instrument track within the four slots provided by the Inspector’s MIDI insert panel for the respective track. There are lots of utility‑style functions available, but for this workshop I’m going to focus on a more creative task: adding variation to a melodic MIDI part, such as a lead or bass line. A number of individual plug‑ins can serve a useful purpose here, but you can also combine them in some interesting ways. Particularly good candidates are the Step Designer, MIDI Modifiers and Density plug‑ins. I’ll explain how you can use these plug‑ins below, and you can find some audio examples on the SOS website (https://sosm.ag/cubase-0623).

Start Me Up

Your melodic starting point might come from a part you’ve already recorded into a MIDI clip, but if you’re stuck then Step Designer can be a great source of inspiration, especially if the piano/keyboard isn’t your first instrument. In essence, Step Designer is a sort of streamlined MIDI grid editor, but it’s designed specifically to make it easy to create short musical patterns. Once you’ve created a pattern, that pattern will loop on playback in sync with your project.

As well as creating note patterns, Step Designer lets you add controller data on a per‑step basis.

Step Designer’s preset patterns provide a useful introduction to what’s possible, but the key features include user control over the step size and count (up to 32 steps), the option to add swing to your pattern, the ability to add controller information for each step for velocity, gate (note length within a step), bank select and a single MIDI CC of your choice (CC10 for pan can be good fun). There are also useful tools for reversing patterns and moving them forwards/backwards by a step.

Each instance of Step Designer can hold up to 200 patterns, and you can easily copy/paste patterns.

Wonderfully, each instance of Step Designer can hold up to 200 patterns, and you can easily copy/paste patterns. So if you create a good pattern as a starting point, you can duplicate it and then edit the duplicate to create a variation. Also, you can automate switching between the first 92 patterns by recording MIDI notes onto the Step Designer MIDI track. These notes themselves are not played by your sound source (only Step Designer’s patterns will trigger sounds); they just serve to switch between Step Designer’s patterns.

Creating a pattern is a simple matter of adding notes with your mouse, by clicking or dragging in the pattern grid. You can remove a note completely by simply clicking on it. Step Designer only allows you to place one note on each step, though, not chords.

Particularly effective (and speedy) is dragging your mouse across the grid editor to create a ‘flow’ of notes (perhaps a melodic line that sweeps up or down as it progresses). As we’ll see in a moment, while Step Designer is not key/scale sensitive (so some additional tweaking of your ‘note flows’ might be required), our next MIDI plug‑in can provide an automatic solution...

Fix It In The Mix

The ‘correction’ of any duff notes in your quickly created ‘mouse drag’ note patterns can be automated using the MIDI Modifiers plug‑in. Placed in the MIDI insert slot below Step Designer, it can also do some other useful things to add both variety and a touch of ‘human’ to your Step Designer patterns.

The MIDI Modifiers plug‑in has a number of different parameter sections that allow you to (surprise!) modify the MIDI data as it passes through, and two sections are of particular interest to us. The Random section allows you to apply random changes to any two of the pitch, position, velocity or length parameters for MIDI notes. For this example, I’ve used it to randomise the pitch of the incoming note upwards by up to 5 semitones (it also allows negative shifts, but I’ve not done that here). I’ve then also randomised the MIDI velocity of the incoming notes by ±10 steps.

With both these options, the settings you choose will influence the degree of variation that gets applied to your Step Designer pattern, with smaller min/max values producing more subtle changes (and vice versa). In terms of pitch, depending upon the major/minor emphasis of the overall piece, favouring positive changes only can often produce a more ‘up’ feel, while negative changes might create a somewhat darker mood.

If you pop open the Scales option in the MIDI Modifiers plug‑in, you get access to a huge collection of scale presets as well as the option to create your own custom scales.

To fix duff notes visit the bottom of the MIDI Modifiers panel. Here, you can specify a scale type and a root note (in this case, I’m using the Melodic Minor scale in E). Any MIDI note that arrives at this point in the processing chain that doesn’t already fit the selected key/scale is automatically shifted to the nearest ‘correct’ note. Therefore, whatever notes you’ve defined within your Step Designer pattern, by the time they leave the MIDI Modifiers plug‑in, they will at least be in key.

Incidentally, if you’re starting a new project with this ‘melodic variation’ experiment and don’t yet have a set of chords or key/scale combination in mind, it can be quite interesting to explore different scale/key settings to see quite what they do to your Step Designer pattern; some may sound terrible, but occasionally you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what pops out. The Scale setting offers a huge range of scale types to choose from, each with its own musical flavour, and you can also choose to define your own scale should you wish; it’s powerful stuff.

The Immensity Of Density

Having added some pitch and velocity variation to our Step Designer melody, the final option I’ll suggest is the Density plug‑in. This is super‑simple to use and, popped into the MIDI insert chain after MIDI Modifiers, it provides a single ‘note density’ setting that allows you to either reduce or increase the number of notes played.

In this example, I’ve used a Density setting of 80 percent. This simply indicates that, for each note reaching the plug‑in, there is an 80 percent chance that it will be passed onwards (so a 20 percent chance that the note will be discarded and won’t play). This is done in a random fashion for each incoming note and can therefore be used to thin out your melody in a random fashion to a greater or lesser extent. If you automate Density’s bypass button, you can use the effect to flip between your full melodic phrase (all notes present) and a sparser version of the same thing (a percentage of the notes randomly removed).

This overall MIDI plug‑in chain can create some really cool results, especially with a plucky synth lead or piano sound that’s providing a topline over a suitable chord sequence. Among the audio examples available on the SOS website you can hear the full MIDI plug‑in chain in action.

One More Thing

Well, two things actually! First, in the text above, I’ve described the process as applied to a lead melodic line. In that context, you can perhaps get away with some more extreme randomisation settings. However, apply more subtle settings (maybe just ±2 semitones of pitch randomisation and an 80‑90 percent Density) and it can add some suitably modest variety to a Step Designer‑driven bass line.

The second thing is perhaps the one frustration with the workflow described here: it’s not straightforward to record the MIDI output resulting from the MIDI insert processing chain. Yes, the manipulated MIDI data will reach your virtual instrument for playback, but there’s no simple way to capture the wonders of the randomisation as actual MIDI data so that you can edit it further or lock in some of the best results so that they play back in an identical fashion every time. There are ways and means, though, so this is definitely a topic I’ll come back to explore another time!   

Published June 2023