Generating Many New Varations at Once

Put variation in global parameters (applies to all instruments) 

Interesting idea, which I had not thought of, thanks.

I tried this, and it works, but with limitations that I hope could be transcended in the future.

1.   "Applies to all instruments" is a major limitation.   A simple example would be wanting to vary other instruments without messing up the drums.  

   Generally speaking though, there might be any combination of instruments desired for variation, with a desire for the remaining instruments to be held constant.  Some sort of UI aspect would be required to allow the distinction between those instruments to be varied and those not to be.   With that, we would have a very nice ability to recompose a single container very rapidly.

2. The situation with multiple containers is interesting.  I notice that I can apply the variation in a parent and it will affect all the children.   If #1 above were solved, we would have a decent plateau to rest on, albeit one that requires some careful arrangement of structure in the first place for this capability to be maximally simple and convenient in use for "variational recomposition" of all, or any part of a project.

    

3. Ideal, I think, for "variational recomposition" would be to have "New Variation for All Selected Containers", possibly in two flavors:   With Inheritance,   Without Inheritance.     IOW, we would be able to "variationally recompose" just exactly whatever sections of the composition desired, from a single container all the way up to the entire arrangement.  

   

Also ideally, the question of which instruments to affect would be answerable in two ways:   a) on a defined-per-container basis, (each container remembers its own settings until they are changed) or b) on an "override" basis (meaning treat all selected containers the same for the next New Variation operation, regardless of their current individual settings).

I realize this all may be going a bit further into randomization/variation than so-far contemplated, but I also think it is very much in the spirit of "music prototyping".   

While the actual development would be non-trivial, I'm sure, these ideas are all based on straightforward extensions of capabilities already in Synfire.    To me, large-scale recomposition capabilities like this are a natural direction to proceed in  - both for fun and POWER!

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to your thoughts!

Dragging around Variation parameters  ...

Thanks for calling out that workflow, this is new to me.

I see I can drag a Variation param from one container to another, and that will move it.

I can also Ctrl-drag which will duplicate a Param and copy it to the destination.

Along with copy-and-paste, I agree, these are fast way to create and distribute Variation params (and presumably other params).

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The Parameter Trace display indeed shows everyplace in Structure that the selected Param is present for the selected Instrument.     Nice!    

(I was used to using the Parameter Trace view for observing where the active Harmony was coming from, but had not yet taken in this general concept for selected-Instrument/selected-Parameter in all cases.)

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Do I understand correctly that within a container, we cannot at this time see in one glance which instruments have a selected Parameter applied to them?    IOW, we have to click thru each instrument and observe if the Parameter LED(s) are on for that instrument.   

If I've described this correctly, I'd like to suggest that we be able to do the opposite as well.   By this I mean  click thru each Parameter and (somehow) observe in the instrument list which (if any) instruments the currently selected Parameter is applied to.    IOW (probably), some sort of tiny LED on each instrument that shows if the currently selected Parameter (the blue one) is present for that instrument.

This would be a prelude for:

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In addition to New Variation, which regenerates for a single instrument, a command 'New Variations (all)' which would do the regenerations for multiple instruments in the current container at once.

I can pretty much tell that you don't like the idea of this happening across more than one container at a time (though I would <g>), but surely within a single container if we want new variations for Bass, Pad, and Guitar all at once with a single click that would be undangerous and simple to comprehend.

You can also make a container with nothing but Variation inside and move it around. Even nudging its position by 1/8 will have dramatic effect. And it can have Variation for selected instruments only.

That is extremely cool!    Thanks.

Wonderful, I'm getting it now.   This is a brilliant design!

So, in picture terms, my suggestion above would look something like this to get one-click simultaneous re-Variation of desired instruments in a single container:

You can also make a container with nothing but Variation inside and move it around. Even nudging its position by 1/8 will have dramatic effect. And it can have Variation for selected instruments only.

Is there a way to lock the editor display to a container other than the current selected container?

Motivation is to be able to drag around a variation-only parent container while observing the effects on a child.