Energy XT tips

[ras.s]

Just noticed I can drag around in the piano roll view and in the sequencer view with holding down right button on the mouse. Handy. Guess I could have read that somewhere, but not reading manuals gives you pleasent surprises every now and then.

Come on folks, flood your tips&tricks over here. A sidechaining screenshot anyone?

Off to test the new beta..



Edit: There's more to it..

Also noticed I can click on the notes on the pianoroll with Ctrl-key pressed down: it selects all notes on that line. D'OH! Wish I would have known that sooooo much earlier.. But better late than never, I guess.

Even more love for this little beast of an sequencer.

[phonatic]

too many beers i think

[GaryOpenH]

ok, some simple beginner tips i use all the time.

For long midi drone notes etc, freeze tracks so the notes will sound even if you dont start at the beginning of the notes. simple unfreeze (by clikcing freeze again, weird i know) to edit.

Use group channels not only for submixing but when automating volum in a track always route to a group channel to get another non controled "master" volum for that specific track.

Xt doesnt have a cpu monitor, so ctrl-alt-del on windows brings up the system monitor that yopu can keep in the system tray instead.

xt got a great wav stretch thingy, useful for many things. For instant, make the top audio strip menu visible, and select a wav file in a audio track. change it to "stretch" in the menu. by scrolling the "coarse" and "fine" numbers you can now literally tune the audio files but without changing the length of it.

If you dont want to use the xt drum thing but a normal piano roll instead, just drag your wavs to the onboard synth instead and use that as a sampler and setup your drums there.

If you have a great sound effect or something in a cpu heavy vst, to save cpu power just bounce that sound to a new track and delete the vst. Or load it up in the onbard synth/sampler for more control.

For longer projects than need a little bit of organizing, use empty midi tracks just for text notes and headlines, f.inst one to mark main parts, one for subparts, etc. Just enter midi parts and write the text with caps in the "rename" box. I thknk you basicly can write as much as you want in those boxes!
Of course, with many tracks, you also use track colors to organize trakcs better: pads in one one color, rythm in another etc. it just helps a lot to be a little orginized.

[phonatic]

might be a useful tip this time

found this out last night. If like me you make layered sounds (low / mid / high versions of the same sound to make thicker sounds) you can do this without bouncing down a loop, loading 3 versions up and adding effects as required. I used to have to do this all the time in my old host, and it lost a lot of flexibility as I was stuck with a bounced loop.

So set up your instrument as normal. get your sound and riff going, then simply duplicate the instrument track as many times as you need and copy the midi clips to the new tracks. you end up with multiple instrument tracks all pointing to the same vsti, but you can add seperate effects to each track, and best of all, you haven't lost the flexibility of using an instrument / midi over audio.

If you want to amend the midi patterns you already have, you simply select all of the tracks that point to the same vsti and record as normal. Same for recording new midi clips.

I've been wanting something like this for time!

[deleted]

DELETED

[thedazed]

You can also record a bus by creating a audio track in the sequencer and selecting the bus as its input. This can be useful, when you come up with a sound or a effect combination, that you don't want use for the entire track but for a moment only. Or useful for the mentioned 'virtualized overhead' track.

hmmm... maybe i made something wrong, but i have the same Problem like synthcom... was there a solution for this?

Edit: oops, i found it right here in the Thread^^ with the Second Sequencer it works thanks for the tip!

[chaos318]

For parameter automation i use most of the time extra automation tracks.
This means i make a track just for the automation of group or a plugin.
For example one want to have the volume automation of a synth track.
Then make a new "Group" and name it usefull like "B:Synth"(B for bus)and route the output of the synthesizer to this group only.
Then make a new midi track and name it "V:Synth" (well, V for volume or use A for automation) and route the midi output to the midi in of the group.
Now you may create different "clips" for automation and with the overlay function you'll see the automation curve in big.

Volume automation is just one usage for this and it can be used in different ways.

[mickwest1]

might be a useful tip this time

found this out last night. If like me you make layered sounds (low / mid / high versions of the same sound to make thicker sounds) you can do this without bouncing down a loop, loading 3 versions up and adding effects as required. I used to have to do this all the time in my old host, and it lost a lot of flexibility as I was stuck with a bounced loop.

So set up your instrument as normal. get your sound and riff going, then simply duplicate the instrument track as many times as you need and copy the midi clips to the new tracks. you end up with multiple instrument tracks all pointing to the same vsti, but you can add seperate effects to each track, and best of all, you haven't lost the flexibility of using an instrument / midi over audio.

If you want to amend the midi patterns you already have, you simply select all of the tracks that point to the same vsti and record as normal. Same for recording new midi clips.

I've been wanting something like this for time!

This is a bit misleading - if you duplicate a track Ext loads in a new instance of the plug in. To route to an existing plugin create new instrument tracks (by double clicking below all tracks) and select them all -then route the outputs to the plugin

If you want a midi part to output to 3 plugins you can just add new outputs to a single track

[mickwest1]

For parameter automation i use most of the time extra automation tracks.
This means i make a track just for the automation of group or a plugin.
For example one want to have the volume automation of a synth track.
Then make a new "Group" and name it usefull like "B:Synth"(B for bus)and route the output of the synthesizer to this group only.
Then make a new midi track and name it "V:Synth" (well, V for volume or use A for automation) and route the midi output to the midi in of the group.
Now you may create different "clips" for automation and with the overlay function you'll see the automation curve in big.

Volume automation is just one usage for this and it can be used in different ways.

These are options - but the simplest way is to create a new instrument track and set the output to the synth

[ras.s]

Quite simple, but there's a good chance for some serious mindfockery, so here's a reminder;

Multiple time signatures running in sync are easily achieved in eXT:

Open the modular tab in your project.
Add as many sequencers as you need and change their individual timestamps to what you want.
That's about it then, welcome to polyrythmic soundmaze.

To control it all, it's easy to create a new tab, and dock the sequencers in that one (maybe rename them for easier visual), minimize them and line them up on top of each other. The in-line pianoroll is good for viewing each sequencer' content. Or you can dock each sequencer's pianoroll editor into a new tab. It's also possible to control one instrument with several sequencers (say, a hihat playing eights in one seq, and then adding hits to it in some obscure signature in another seq).

You have to set each sequencer's loop points accordingly. This obviously can also be used creatively, for example having a smaller loop play on top of a longer cycle. And to give the whole thing another twist, you can use eXT as a plugin in another host, only outputting kinky MIDI ..

[xoxos]

finding eXT2 extremely usable and stable (lol, >five years now) but -

if by some chance you're doing something (like automation where you keep minutely adjusting a point) and it crashes and you desperately press save and then see your song file has disappeared (i saw one report of this from years ago), look for the song file called "temp_file_name" and retrieve your work.

[xoxos]

knew i had more to post..

both of these tips give me a good ~10% more cpu -

every time you open the eXT app:
(windows) open task manager > processes > find energyXT, right click and set priority to realtime.

every time you open a song in eXT:
1) play the track some to engage the audio engine.
2) open the ASIO4ALL control panel. change the ASIO buffer size. just change it to another value (this seems to work with anything except the max 2048 setting).

"doesn't make sense" but i can run an extra instrument or two without drops if i do this.

[g-berg]

moved...

[lucianul]

A few times now I've moved a complete project folder to a different location - and then when I load the moved project 1 or more audio files are shown as "not loaded" and have a question mark added in the audio pool - even though the files actually are in the audio folder

You can avoid this problem with the project path if:
- you keep your Projects folder always inside energyxt
- you put your Projects folder with relative path in energyxt.ini .
If no project folder is defined in energyxt.ini, then by default energyxt puts the absolute path of its projects folder.
So add your desired projects folder in setup-browser-projects.
Then close energyxt, edit energyxt.ini by changing your path to relative (path).
For e.g. if it was:
C:\Program Files (x86)\energyxt\Projects=Projects
change it to:
Projects=Projects

This will work only if your energyxt shortcut from desktop has the field
Start in: C:\Program Files (x86)\energyxt
otherwise it will not find your folder.

This is the reason why demosong.xt always works.

[bmertelj]

For parameter automation i use most of the time extra automation tracks.
This means i make a track just for the automation of group or a plugin.
For example one want to have the volume automation of a synth track.
Then make a new "Group" and name it usefull like "B:Synth"(B for bus)and route the output of the synthesizer to this group only.
Then make a new midi track and name it "V:Synth" (well, V for volume or use A for automation) and route the midi output to the midi in of the group.
Now you may create different "clips" for automation and with the overlay function you'll see the automation curve in big.

Volume automation is just one usage for this and it can be used in different ways.

I use it for "MIDI SideChain emulation". I create a separate volume control track as you described above. Then, I create a short part (just 1 bar) with volume control that brings down the Group (bass, pads) for the duration of the kick (very short). Then it can be duplicated/ghosted over all of the song.