Automation in LMMS

What is Automation? In LMMS, there are quite a lot of knob like controls where you can turn clockwise or anti-clockwise to change their values. However. these controls can only be changed manually. What if I want to decrease the volume of a particular track at a certain point of my song and increase the volumn after a few seconds? This is when you would want to use automation. Automation basically controls the knobs programmatically so that you can incoporate the changes when the song is playing. This is actually quite easy to accomplish however I will try to give step by step directions to recreate automations.

Step 1

You will need to create an automation track in order for the automation to work. To do this, go to Song-Editor and look for the 7th button from the left (the one that has a graph and a plus sign on it). Click it and you will see an extra track added into the Song-Editor.

End of Step 1 should look like this

Step 2

Click on the black area of the automation track and configure the length of effect of the automation track.

Customize your automation track

Step 3

In this example, we will just be changing the volumn of the triple oscillator. However this can work for any knob control. Just hover above the knob, hold the ctrl button and click the knob. Drag the knob to the area where you have customized in step 2. Know the automation is connected to the controls of the knob!

Click drag and drop

Step 4

Now double click on the customized area and a new window will open. In this window, you control the values of the knob by creating peaks(increase) or dips(decrease). In my example, I want the volume to increase steadily therefore I will create multiple peaks.

Something like this

As you can see, these step like increases will not actually increase the volume steadily (even though I can't really hear a difference). But if you want a steady increase, 5th to 7th button from the left and test out their effect.

These are the buttons to test out

You are done!

If you follow the steps carefully, it should work. In this example, I did not create a track using the triple oscillator so you won't actually see any effects now. After you have created a track using the triple oscillator and play the song, you will see that the volume knob will self adjust accordingly.