::|CONTENTS
- The New Note Action
- Envelopes Galore
- Free Atmosphere Ultimate
- See also
Sure, most of us have probably spent a bit of time in the Instruments tab in OpenMPT. Most people have probably wanted a volume envelope to decay, for example, or maybe a lowpass filter envelope. But there's a whole bunch of other cool things you can do to shape your sound without needing to input lots of effects into your patterns and/or use lots of channels! These will be especially useful for doing size-limited modules like
mod04k,
mod08k, etc., and for adding broad strokes quickly for the purposes of XHBing!
The New Note Action
Perhaps the most insane feature of them all is the New Note Action. This is something that's easy to overlook since it doesn't have a name that might make it seem relevant, but what it does is
govern what happens when a new note triggers in a channel on the Instrument you're editing. By default this has a very expected behavior: Note Cut, i.e. once the tracker hits the row with the new note, the old note is cut. Bye-bye.
But things get a LOT more interesting with the other options:
Continue,
Note Off, and
Note Fade.
Setting New Note Action to
Continue will cause the previous note to just keep playing when a new one happens. You may not want this for most melodic sounds, but it can be useful to write many drum parts within one channel without their sounds cutting off, or to trigger one-shots.
Where things get exciting is
Note Off and
Note Fade. First,
Off is the equivalent of the
== note command; if a Sustain area is turned on for any of your Instrument's envelopes, it triggers the part of the envelopes after the Sustain (i.e. the Release portion). We'll talk about the envelopes more later, but what this means in practice is you can have many, many notes in their Release phases coming from just a single channel, which is a way of efficiently achieving "reverb", delay effects, and other weird sounds without taking up extra data. (As an added bonus, Note Off also triggers the shift from a sample's "Sustain Loop" to its regular "Loop", if you're using both on the Samples tab.)
Meanwhile
Note Fade (equivalent of
~~ note command) serves a similar function but is less versatile; if New Note Action is set to this, the old note starts fading out at the rate defined in the "Fade Out" parameter to the left. The smaller the Fade Out value, the longer fading out takes (0 is eternal, too). You can get some nice reverb this way without ever having to futz with envelopes.
Below the Action option are a couple more settings that determine what specifically happens if you trigger
the same note on the Instrument in the same channel. This behavior can be different, which might be useful sometime.
Envelopes Galore
A surface-level usage of the envelope feature is pretty self-explanatory. If you click "Vol" for example, the Volume envelope is turned on. Drawing a line sloping downward will cause the volume to decay. Since the graph is over time (ticks specifically), making the line longer will cause it to take longer. Changing the tempo will affect this too, because that controls the length of a tick.
Notably, in .it you can only have
either the Pitch or Filter envelope enabled here at once. The buttons on the left take you to each envelope; leftmost "dial" button is Volume, middle "headphone" button is Pan, and rightmost "sine wave" button is Pitch/Filter.
Where things get interesting with the envelopes is the buttons on the right:
Envelope Loop,
Envelope Sustain, and
Envelope Carry. The true power of the envelopes lies here!
Most useful of all is the
Envelope Sustain, the middle button. (Yes, we're going out of order, sorry.) This adds two dotted lines
¦¦ to the graph that can be dragged to different points along the envelope to create the
sustain region. The envelope will loop the sustain region until/unless a Note Off (
==) command occurs, at which point it will continue onward to whatever you have graphed after the sustain region. Remember the "Note Off" option on the New Note Actions? If you use both these features together, this behavior will occur every new note! You can program your own decay, delay sound, crescendo, whatever!
Now let's talk about
Envelope Loop, which is slightly different than Sustain. It adds two solid lines
|| to the graph that you can drag around, too, and it predictably sets a region that loops repeatedly. It's not quite as powerful as Sustain, but it can be used in conjunction with Sustain to loop the region
after the Sustain loop, as in the shown example where it begins on the same point as the Sustain markers and ends on the very last point. This means that rather than just triggering the Release envelope once with a Note Off (
==), the marked portion will keep looping. The note
does fade out in this case, at the rate defined in "General - Fade Out" (shown and mentioned in the section above).
Lastly there is
Envelope Carry, which if enabled will stop the envelope from re-triggering each new note. This is useful if you want a filter or volume sweep across several notes.
Free Atmosphere Ultimate
If you are willing to relinquish some level of fine control over your arrangement, you can get a lot of differences in texture without spending time (or data) on shaping different volumes and panning settings using the
Random Variation sliders. A little goes a long way in both cases.
Random Volume is useful for keeping both drums and pitched instruments from sounding too static if tracked at one volume. Of course, you can write in all the volume changes yourself, and there is plenty of merit to this, but it is especially relevant in size-restricted module formats, where volume changes in the same channel take up extra space.
Random Panning of course does what it says on the tin, and if you mouse over the slider it will tell you how many values away it can randomize. This can be used for slight stereo variation or a pretty striking stereo image. Another thing you can do for "free" panning differences is to use the
Pitch/Pan Separation feature, which can be used for example on a piano to actually pan the notes according to their physical location. Even something like 1-3 for the Separation (Sep) value will probably be enough, though it goes all the way to 32. Essentially this correlates the pitch of the note with the left-right stereo.
Random Filter Cutoff and Filter Resonance are not available to .it but become available in
.mptm if ever you find yourself playing around with that format.
The other Free Atmosphere Ultimate tool is actually not in the Instruments tab at all but rather the Samples tab:
Auto-vibrato. If you use this feature, the sample and its Instruments will trigger vibrato of your chosen settings on their own every time! This can be useful to free up the effects/volume columns to do something else.
There are actually a pleasant number of options for the auto-vibrato:
* Four options for
waveform are available: Sine, Square, Ramp Down (Saw), and Random! Yes, noise can shape your vibrato! Neat, huh?
*
Sweep (0-255) determines how quickly the vibrato starts occurring. High values make it trigger faster.
*
Depth (0-32) sets how widely you want the pitch to oscillate. Higher values equal wider vibrato.
*
Rate (0-64) sets how quickly you want one period of the vibrato to last, i.e. how fast you want the vibrato to be.
I hope you enjoyed this little guide to making cool sounds with .IT! It may be useful if you enjoy the size-restrictive module formats here on Battle of the Bits or just if you want to up your sound design game with this awesome tracker format.
See also
The tinymod formats:
*
mod04k (format)
*
mod08k (format)
*
mod12k (format)
*
mod16k (format)
*
mod24k (format)
*
mod32k (format)
*
mod48k (format)
*
mod64k (format)
Related formats:
*
S3XMODIT (*.s3m, *.xm, *.mod, *.it)
*
Amigamod (*.mod)
*
ModPlugTracker Module (*.mptm)
Related articles:
*
Tinymod Optimization Strategies - how to get as much out of these formats as you can
*
IT Module Optimisation - some older, more technical stuff than what's written there
