DIGITAL PERFORMER NOTES

MOTU on OS X; Search Facility

Published in SOS October 2002
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Technique : Software

Digital Performer's Search window. Here it's set up to search bars 14 to 21, and to select any pitch-bend, mono aftertouch and continuous controller 1 and 7 data that it finds.

It's not a word processor, but DP3's search facilities can still be very useful, as we find out this month. Plus the latest news on MOTU's move towards OS X compatibility...

One of Digital Performer's traditional strengths is its user-friendliness and relative simplicity. In just a few parts of the program, though, some complexity is inescapable, and the Search command is an example of this. It's worth getting your hands dirty with this one, though, because it can be astonishingly useful. You can use it for simple things, like finding all notes beneath a certain pitch in a single track (ready for transposition, deletion, or whatever). Or you can get it to do something complex, like find all notes and soundbites that fall on the fifth 16th-note of each bar, the notes having a velocity less than 24! Virtually any kind of search is possible, and the more you use Search, the more you'll find uses for it.

In essence, what Search does is simple — it looks for data in your Sequence or Project based on criteria you specify. When it's found the data it will select it, so you can Cut, Copy, or carry out any other action. Alternatively, individual events can be displayed in a window so that you can examine them in detail and just select a few if necessary. You can Search within the data found by a previous Search, and zone in on all kinds of events with amazing precision. More on that next month, though — now it's time for some Search basics.

The Search window (above) is opened by holding down Control and hitting the 'S' key, or selecting Perform New Search... from the Search menu, which is found under DP's Edit menu. The window a

Current Version     Digital Performer: v3.02.

ppears with some default settings in two sections labelled 'Time' and 'Event Attribute'. These's also an 'Action' pop-up menu that broadly determines what happens to any data that's found during a Search.

What the Search window doesn't have is a way to specify which tracks get searched, and this is where a little bit of expertise comes in handy. In a nutshell, Search does its stuff in whatever editing window is uppermost behind the Search window itself, unless you've clicked the Search In All Sequences box (which always strikes me as a pretty blunt tool). If you want to search in all tracks then make sure it's the Tracks window that is uppermost. For a single track, just open a editing window for it. And for a mixture of audio and MIDI tracks, open the Sequence Editor and show/hide tracks as necessary. In practice, this is beautifully intuitive — you really just have to make sure you're looking at the tracks you want to investigate before hitting the Search button.

With your tracks chosen, you can now make appropriate settings in the Time section (to tell DP which sections of your tracks to look at). The pop-up on the far left here contains some self-explanatory se

Quick Tips     When you're using Sonic Modulator (discussed elsewhere this month), modulation can be applied negatively as well as positively, which is particularly useful when you want 'upside-down' envelope shapes or when you're using the sawtooth waveform in an LFO. Just click the 'arrow' toggle switches next to each modulation source pop-up menu. Often, you'll want to set up Sonic Modulator's frequency bands so that they're nearly (but not exactly) the same. You can save time by first of all setting up one band with each module's 'link' switch turned on — this locks together the controls in both bands. Then, with the module links turned off, each band can again be adjusted separately.

arch locations, like 'All Time' and 'Selection Range' (which only works if you've made a time-range selection first, as explained a couple of months ago). A useful option, though, is Value, which spawns an additional pop-up with a range of qualifiers such as 'is within range', 'is greater than' and so on, which let you quickly zone in on specific parts of your track or tracks. To the right of the pop-ups is a text box (or two, when necessary) where you can enter time values in all DP's standard time formats, as determined by the time format button on the far right. So if you wanted to search in bars 14 to 21, say, just select 'Value', 'is within range' and then type 14 and 22 into the two text fields with time format set to bars and beats.

The Event Attribute section is wide-ranging, but again largely self-explanatory. It's here that you specify what you're looking for. The pop-up menu on the far left determines the basic data type, and includes notes, controller data or audio track automation. For each data type selected, appropriate additional pop-up menus and other gadgets appear to make it easier to specify exactly what you want to find.

A key data type is notes, for which you can specify absolute pitches, a pitch range, on or off velocities, or duration. Another is soundbite, which allows you to search by name, duration, samp

The glitzy extended view of Sonic Modulator. Here it's set up for some serious flanging, with the delays modulated by LFOs 1 and 2.

le rate, audio tempo and a whole host of other criteria. However, possibly the most useful option here is Event Type, with its second pop-up set to 'Choose'. This allows you to specify broad types of data to search for, and can also handle multiple automation types. It's very good for, say, finding all pitch-bend data in a particular track section, ready for removal or modification.

Finally, at the bottom of the Search window, the Action pop-up menu is crucial — you use this to tell DP what to do with the data it finds. Create New Selection is a good option if you want to erase what DP finds or apply an action to it, such as moving, transposing or quantising. Add To Current Selection is handy when you run a number of searches one after another, and stops data selected in a previous search from becoming deselected. Display In Search Results Window does what it says, but doesn't select any data in your sequence.

That's a brief overview of Search, which for many users will be quite enough! Next month, though, I'll be looking at Search in more depth and considering how multiple criteria can be combined to best effect. I'll also be considering what a Search results window can do to enhance your life!

Sonic Modulator is one of DP3's most intriguing plug-ins. It consists of a filter and crossover, plus various smaller processing modules — a pitch-shifter, delay and automated volume control — each of which can be modulated by any of four LFOs or a level-triggered envelope generator. If all that sounds a little

MOTU & OS X — Latest News     It's beautiful, stable, and it's getting faster, but so far Apple's much vaunted new operating system, OS X, has been of little use to Digital Performer users, even though MIDI drivers for it have been available from MOTU for quite a while. Recently, however, an OS X beta version of the ClockWorks application, which configures MOTU's range of MIDI interfaces, was posted at www.motu.com. And, just as I thought I'd wrapped up Performer Notes for a month, MOTU not only put up OS X FireWire audio drivers for the 828 interface, but also announced Digital Performer for OS X (prompted perhaps by the Apple/Emagic bombshell), saying it will be available by the end of the year. They've even put out a screenshot (right) of what is supposedly an early development version, but I've a suspicion that what we're seeing is actually a mock-up in Photoshop, probably of DP3.1 superimposed on an OS X desktop. Still, it's great to know that MOTU are taking OS X seriously, especially if you, like me, won't be sorry to see the back of OS 9.

arcane, then it might help to think of Sonic Modulator in the same way as its designers apparently did — as a Leslie speaker simulation. All the necessary processing is there — a crossover, pitch-shifter (for doppler effects), a delay (for chorus and flanging) and a tremolo (or auto-pan). Ironically though, Sonic Modulator isn't that great a Leslie simulator — you'd be better off looking at Native Instruments' B4 for that — but nonetheless it's a very powerful manipulator of sound that can be used in subtle or extreme ways. One thing to watch for, though — Sonic Modulator is only available in a mono-to-stereo version, so it's not available on stereo tracks, or even on mono tracks if they have stereo-output plug-ins in a higher insert slot.

The signal flow in Sonic Modulator is best appreciated when it's in its colourful 'expanded view' form (see above). The architecture is, in many ways, quite synth-like, with bypassable processing modules in series and a bank of modulators which can be applied very flexibly.

The audio signal first of all passes through a Multi-mode filter module. Low- and high-pass types are available, as well as band-pass and band-reject (notch), both with variable bandwidth (the Range control). There are conventional cutoff frequency and resonance controls, and cutoff frequency can be controlled by any of the five modulation sources. 'Amount' controls the modulation depth.

The Crossover module is next. Apparently MOTU were originally going to put this first, and have two filters, one for each of the resulting high- and low-frequency bands, but they found the present design more musically useful. The crossover sports a frequency knob, plus two 'In' buttons. These are effectively bypass switches for the following processing modules in each frequency band. However, I wonder if I'm alone in thinking that they've been configured in a very confusing way. As of Sonic Modulator v2.0, at least, pressing the high band's 'In' button seems to route signal through the low band's modules, and vice versa. In Sonic Modul

MOTU's screenshot of Digital Performer for OS X — a reassuring sight for many users.

ator's condensed view (accessed by hitting the square button near the top left of the window) the 'In' buttons are renamed 'Bypass', and work much more as you'd expect.

Next comes the Pitch module, with just a modulation amount knob and a modulation source pop-up menu. Only relatively small amounts of pitch-shift are possible, but this module can nevertheless conjure up anything from subtle vibrato and Leslie effects to laser-gun madness and, amazingly enough, some really convincing vinyl scratching effects! To achieve these, set the modulation source to a sine-wave LFO beating at about 5Hz, set the modulation amount to maximum, and toggle the pitch section's Bypass switch.

Moving on, the Delay module is just a single-tap design, but with predominantly short delay times that can be modulated. The Mix control determines the relative levels of dry and delayed signals — by dialling in negative amounts delays are produced out-of-phase. This, combined with out-of-phase feedback, adds significantly to the range of tonal possibilities. The Amount control is really modulation amount, and controls the extent to which the delay time (labelled 'ms') is modulated. The stereo button puts left and right signals out of phase, producing an exaggerated stereo effect. Above all, this module excels at creating chorus and flanger effects, but it's capable of far more — try modulating delay time with an LFO set to sample & hold, for example.

The Amp module comes last in the chain, providing automated volume effects. Set to be modulated by an LFO, its key role is in producing tremolo effects or, with the stereo button switched in, auto-panning.

The Modulation section itself is pretty straightforward. The four LFOs have configurable waveform and phase, and a rate control. As in other MAS plug-ins, you can select absolute rates (in Hz), or choose tempo-locked alternatives referenced to beats, note values or bars. The Envelope generator can be triggered by the input signal or audio coming in via one of DP's busses.

Using Sonic Modulator can be a mind-expanding experience. Despite the complexity on offer, experimenting with just one modulation source for all the modules is definitely worthwhile, but you can also try more ambitious modulation assignments, bypassing one of the frequency bands to obtain bizarre shimmering highs or lows, whilst leaving most of your signal perfectly intact.