TW #81–89 — Impulse Tracker Tip of the Week #1–8 (Pinion) and More Impulse Tracker Tips (Pulse)

pinion's series, started because "Impulse Tracker has too many features that are not utilized to their full potential", with a correction and extra tips from IT's author jeffrey-lim (Pulse).

Key claims#

• #1 Reverb from envelopes (#81): take a sample that already has a reverb tail, loop the tail (ping-pong loops work best), trim the rest with ALT-L, then give the instrument a decaying volume envelope and NNA continue so the next note doesn't clip it. A sustain loop plus === after the note lets you turn the tail off at will.
• #2 NNAs (#82): default NNA fade gives a piano a key-off sustain in one channel instead of four or five; NNA continue is for drums and short unlooped samples (a ringing loop that never stops will "annoy the listener into deleting your song"); instruments are nearly free in file size, so make several per sample with different fades/NNAs; per-note override: S73 cut, S74 continue, S75 note off, S76 note fade — they apply when the next note is played. Pulse's correction (#83): a note under S74 continues until an S70 (past-note cut); ^^^ only affects the latest note; watch virtual channel use in the info page's Tot column.
• Pulse: templates (#83): the most useful tool he never used until recently — especially single-row templates ("they have extra player code attached"); examples: C-4 01 X30 | C-5 01 XC0 for a stereo effect, sample doubling C-4 01 | C-4 02, an open fifth C-4 | G-4 | C-5.
• #3 Random melodies (#83): fill a channel with a scale run, NNA note fade, and set the instrument's volume swing to 100 % — chaos composes; "more of a novelty than anything".
• #4 A real use for Jxx (#84): on chords it "is a bit… shitty sounding", but on a looped noise/timbre sample (Spectrum, Pitch Wind) with a pitch envelope falling over a whole pattern, a column full of Jxx makes analog-style sound effects (first seen from Skaven); fade with the volume column or an envelope. A v2.09 bug prevented combining volume-column Exx with Jxx; Pulse fixed it.
• #5 Pitch-envelope siren (#85): a sine sample with a pitch envelope whose sustain loop oscillates up and down; the loop length in ticks is the siren rate, and unlike a sampled siren the rate and depth stay constant when you bend the pitch.
• #6 Reversed drum loops for free (#86): give the loop a ping-pong loop over the whole sample and start it with the sample-offset command Oxx exactly at the turnaround point; for large samples set the high-order offset SAx first and reset it afterwards. Works in FT2 too.
• #7 Stereo phase with Yxy (#87): fill a bass channel with panbrello YF7-ish (rate F, depth 6–7): too fast to hear as panning, reads as width.
• #8 Amplify properly (#89): ALT-H centres the waveform (also cures clicks at trigger/cut), then ALT-M amplifies to the maximum without clipping (push further only for loops/dirt).

Relevance#

The backbone of the impulse-tracker page and of new-note-actions, instrument-envelopes, sample-offset, stereo-panning, randomization-and-probability, chord-arpeggio.

Pages touched#

pinion, jeffrey-lim, impulse-tracker, new-note-actions, instrument-envelopes, sample-offset, stereo-panning, randomization-and-probability, chord-arpeggio, fake-echo.