 Hey, I'm Anfa. In this video, I'll show you how to use the macrolearn feature of Zenfusion. Even though you can see me using it in a few videos, there's a new feature implemented. It was never the main focus, until now. In this video, I'll talk about the history of the feature and teach you how to wield its power. I'll show the practical side using Ardor 5.12. Ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seatbelts. The macrolearn function makes it possible to control up to 64 parameters with 16 macros. This is extremely useful for advanced sound design in the DAW using automation, but also for live performances. It makes a single patch capable of producing widely different sounds depending on how you tweak it with your controller. It's almost like having a hardware synth in front of you, but let's go back and see how macrolearn came to be. That will help us understand how it works now. You can have 256 instruments playing at the same time within a single Zenfusion FX instance. And each of these can play 8 add-synth voices, one sub-synth and one pad-synth voice, which makes a total of 2,560 voices. Unless you play more than one note at a time, of course. Due to that brute-force nature of Zenfusion FX, if you'd want to make all of the controls, all of the possible instruments, automatable in a traditional way, you would end up with a list of parameters so long that it would be completely unusable and would probably crash every DAW in existence too. That's why historically, Zenfusion FX has only exposed a few selected global controls like filter cut-off in resonance, bandwidth, portamento time, frequency modulation depth, etc. That has already allowed for some really cool sound design, but I was dreaming about being able to automate other parameters as well. And it was slowly becoming possible. Before macrolearn was implemented, the legacy Zenfusion FX UI allowed for MIDI learning. You could control middle-click on a knob, then move a MIDI continuous control in your connected hardware or software controller, and Zenfusion FX would bind the two together. However, there was no visual feedback of any kind other than seeing the knob in Zenfusion FX move with your bound control. It was easy to make a mistake and bind something when you didn't want to, and there was no real way to fix that. Shortly, it sucked. But finally, Zenfusion introduced a remedy. Macrolearn is an elegant and powerful solution to this problem. It gives you 16 macros, each of which can be assigned to modulate up to four controls within the synth, with some individual tweaks. This means that you can move one knob and it'll move four knobs inside of your patch, two of which in the opposite direction, for example. You can't complain about having only two hands anymore. So far, I've been only giving you a theoretical overview of the subject. Let's now get closer and see how you would actually use this in a project. Here's an order session that we'll be working with. The first thing I want to do is add a single macro and automate filter cutoff for the super saw instrument. Let's open up Zenfusion FX or Zenfusion's interface. Let's go to the AdSynth panel and here in global filter, we have a default Lopez filter. I want to automate this. So I just click learn, then click on this and it's learned. As you can see, here we have a message saying that part zero, kit zero, AdSynth parameters, global parameters, global filter, base frequency was learned. Let's disable learning so we don't click anything else. Let's go to the macro learn panel and here we have selected the slot zero and you can see that the part zero, kit zero, AdSynth is assigned to this macro slot. So what I can do now is close this, open automation menu, go to processor automation and here will be a list of all the plugins. Choose the Zenfusion FX plugin, slot one. In this menu, they are numbered from one to 16 and in Zenfusion FX interface they are numbered from zero to 15. It's a small inconsistency but it's nothing tragic. So let's activate this and now I have my automation lane. Let's press D to enter the draw mode and now I'll just click and draw something so we can test if this is working. Shift right click will delete a point. Let's change the mode of this automation lane from manual which would just keep this value all the time to play which will use this automation data. Let's play it. Okay that's a bit too much in the some part so I'm gonna move these points up so we have more sound coming through. I also want to add a few points just here at the end so it's a bit more rounded. Let's play again. That's great. The next thing I want to do we'll take a look at this reasebase which right now isn't a reasebase. Let's listen. It's just a sort of. Let's open the Zenfusion FX interface. Let's go to add synth again and you can see it right here we have two voices. Let's go to the voice list and indeed we have two voices both are that sort of wave. In order to make a reasebase we need to detune them like this. However I want to be able to control both of these fine tune sliders with a single macro so let me double click on these to reset them to default. Let's go to the macro learn panel and now note these two buttons. In the normal learn mode if I learn two controls one after another let's do that. Click click. You can see that now the slot one is active. Slot zero has one parameter signed and slot one has another parameter signed but we don't want that. We want both parameters to be assigned to the same macro slot. So let's reset these two and switch to the macro learn mode. Let's go back enable learn and I'm gonna click once twice. Let's disable the learn mode go to the macro learn panel and now you can see we have the slot zero selected and both parameters have been assigned to the same macro. So now we can move them both with this slot. Let's play it and test. You can hear a slight variation in pitch and that is because both voices are detuned in the same direction. What we need to do is flip one of these so I'm gonna use the gain knob. By default it's on 100%. Let's turn this into negative 100%. And now let's see what it does. Okay that's closer to what we wanted. Let's open processor automation. It's not a slot one. Now I'm gonna switch to add synth. Because this is assigned to the macro I can just move it in Ardor and it's gonna update and infusion. You can see that indeed the macro moves the two faders in opposite directions but also the neutral position is right in the middle. We would like the neutral position to be right here. So it's a bit easier. So let's go back to the macro learn panel. Let's try using the offset knobs. Let's offset this one up and this one down. So we're getting our neutral position on the very start. Let's go to add synth and watch these faders. Yes this is better and if we listen it's better but it's not perfect yet. Now I thought I could make this better but I couldn't. What we could try to do is reduce the gain to 50% so that when we have the fader all the way up it doesn't clip our values here. However looks like that's not possible. So let's just go back to gain 100 and negative 100. Our respace is done. Let's just create some automation and we're ready to go. Now of course I need to change this automation lane from the manual mode to the play mode and I can test it out. Okay that's good. Now the third thing I want to show you is that you can use MIDI CC automation instead of plugin automation. What's the difference? MIDI CC automation is embedded into the media regions themselves. Look that if I now move this media region the automation stays behind. Let's undo that. So to actually move it I need to use a range tool, select my MIDI clip, select my automation with Ctrl, Ctrl X to cut it, put my edit point, let's make the edit point the playhead and put my playhead where I want to paste it, Ctrl V to paste it. If I want to duplicate I need to Ctrl V it multiple times. Now if we would be using MIDI CC automation that would be much easier. So let's just try that. However on a different instrument. Here is an instrument I'm gonna use for that. Now let's use the filter. I want to automate this cutoff. Let's open the automation menu. Now here we have automation of all the plugins. This is what we don't want to use now. Below we have the fader, mute and pan automation and below that there's a section with all the MIDI parameters. We have the pitch band automation, pressure and MIDI CCs or continuous controls. Let's open the first one, MIDI CC 1 for channel 1. Now to assign this let's enable the learn mode. I'm going to touch this control and now I'm going to move this one. And as you can see as the nut sub effects follows. Let's disable the learn mode, go to the macro learn and we can see we have slot 0 assigned to MIDI CC 1 which is this one. Now I can close this. Now if you put a point that will be touching the endpoint of the clip it might disappear so let's put it just before. Sweet! Now we can very easily duplicate this using alt D and all the clips are going to use our automation. Let's just add some EQ and reverb. Let's listen. And that's all I wanted to tell you about macro learn and Zenfusion. I forgot to tell you you can rename the macro slots in Zenfusion. Just use this switch to prevent yourself from triggering ardoors hotkeys while you're typing. There are still some issues with macro learn. Anyway I think automation is a fantastic tool for giving computer music expression to break up the repetition, make it more human, make it feel alive. Without that it's only techno. Whatever. If you'd like to get a bit deeper into that I've given a talk about automation on sony convention 2018 and I recently published a video from that talk. I think it gives a very nice introduction, actually an overview of the automation workflow in ardoor 5 and the benefits of using automation in general. One last thing I'd like to say is that I happen to be partially responsible for macro learn's existence. I've submitted the initial idea to Zenfusion's github and helped to flesh out the design. Mark McCurry has run with it and made it real. Thanks Mark. To be honest I really enjoyed this aspect of open source software. People like you and me can have real impact there. That's all for now. Thanks for watching and I hope this video was worth your time. I also want to thank everyone who supports my work financially. These people make it possible for me to make videos like this one. If you'd like to join them and help keep this show going please go to patreon.com slash anfa or liberapay.com slash anfa. Now go and make some music.