With non-linear DAWs such as Ableton Live, Bitwig, and Tracktion Waveform, your computer can play an active role in your workflow. Whether it’s a creative task like writing bass lines, or something as specific as choosing where to boost or attenuate frequencies, your software and hardware can step up to the plate and start making suggestions.
Over the course of two articles, we’ll be looking at several ways you can use your devices to generate ideas and create a machine-generated path through several processes. While we’ve used Ableton Live for the purpose of this article, the following applies to any non-linear DAW.
Sep 29, 2019 iZotope plugins and sluggish computer Reply Contact. I'm using some of the iZotope plugins on my audio tracks and finding that the response of the timeline slows down to the point that I can't use them while editing. So I edit without them and then apply them for playback or output or mixdown. I have alot of memory and a new i9 processor in my. IZotope, Inc. Is an audio technology company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. IZotope develops professional audio software for audio recording, mixing, broadcast, sound design, and mastering which can be used in wide range of Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) programs.
What is a non-linear DAW?
In a non-linear DAW, you are freed from the restraints of a timeline and are able to play any number of clips—aka regions for all your linear DAW users out there—in any succession at any given point in time. There is no beginning, middle, or end in a non-linear DAW. There is only now, then, and later.
Linear music is essentially an experience we have as listeners, not as users. As people who engage with music, whether you’re a technician, creative, or performer, the majority of the time we’re all over the place. When we compose and produce, we don’t start with the first note and end with the last—ideas come to us out of sequence and we put them together accordingly. When we mix there’s a lot of starting, stopping, isolating and tweaking that goes on, and when we practice, we only play things through from beginning to end when we’ve worked out everything leading up to that point.
Non-linear DAWs offer us environments that mimic this timeline free approach to experiencing music. Of course, you can also create an exportable and linear version of your idea to stick into a timeline, so in effect, non-linear DAWs also have linear functionality. For a quick hands-on experience, check out the first page of Ableton’s web-based learning modules.
What are Follow Actions?
Follow Actions are powerful things that will do your bidding. From the Ableton manual, “Follow Actions allow creating chains of clips that can trigger each other in an orderly or random way (or both).”
In a linear sense, Follow Actions are the crux of how playback works for live bands playing to tracks. One set of clips plays back at a certain tempo and once that song is done, it triggers a BPM change and launches the next set of clips, which continues to cascade until the end of the show. The band is playing along to a click/grid, and all is well. There is much more depth and flexibility to playback than this paragraph can explain, but many people primarily use Follow Actions for this specific and very linear live purpose.
Follow Actions also have the ability to create randomness and self generate their playback order based upon parameters you set. You can tell a clip to stop, play again, play the previous clip, play the next clip, play the first clip in an adjacent grouping, play the last clip in an adjacent grouping, play any clip in the group including the one that’s currently playing, or play any other clip.
In addition to setting parameters around what sort of action should take place, we have the ability to set a length of time for the action to take place. For instance, I can tell a clip to launch any other clip after three bars and three beats. To take this a step further, I can create two separate Follow Actions for a single clip and then set a ratio as to how likely each Follow Action will happen. So let’s say I have two Follow Actions: one is instructing the clip to play itself again after one beat, the other is set to play any other clip after one beat, and I have set this to a 2:1 ratio. That means that after one beat, two out of every three times the clip will start over, and one out of three times it will launch another clip in the group.
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In this video, you’ll see this exact scenario in action, with a breakbeat audio file. Watch and listen as the computer generates drum patterns.