Workaround for untriggering an instrument via trigger conditions while keeping quantisation in place?

FMOD Studio
1

So I have a musical system in place that has 4 different tracks within an event, each track having its own instrument clip containing a different musical phrase. The idea is to use a parameter to switch between these different phrases while keeping everything quantised.

The quantisation when starting the instrument via a trigger condition works fine, but when the instrument is untriggered, it immediately stops, rather than playing the rest of the bar, leaving these awkward gaps between the musical phrases rather than chaining them all nicely together.

I’m imagining the perfect outcome to be where the instrument phrase the player is moving from continues to play until the instrument they have moved to triggers, rather than stopping the phrase they’re moving from, then waiting with a silent pause until the phrase they have moved to is triggered via quantisation.

I’ve checked the user manual under Trigger Conditions and found the statement “A quantized instrument will become untriggered immediately when a condition is not met anymore.” which doesn’t seem too promising.

I’ve also tried volume automation instead, but it ends up just “stopping” the phase the player is moving from before it has played out the bar, and “starting” the phrase the player is moving to too early, feeling pretty janky and unsatisfying.

Anyone know if there’s any kind of workaround or anything I’m missing with the quantisation system?

Cheers.

2

At the time of writing (July of 2022), there is no way to quantize the stopping behavior of an instrument in FMOD Studio.

That being said, there may be a simple way to get the behavior you want. Instead of quantizing the trigger behavior of the instruments, quantize the transition: Transition regions and magnet regions can be assigned quantization in the same manner as instruments. If you set each region’s offset mode to “relative,” the playback position will jump to the beat in the destination region that’s equivalent to the beat it’s jumping from in the source region; as long as your four different music sections are the same length (or exact multiples of each other’s lengths) you should get exactly the behavior you want.

1 Like
3

Thanks for the tip Joseph! I had a look at implementing transition regions this morning and it’s worked a charm. Definitely a massive improvement from how I had it set up before.