Craig,

I'm sorry, but I think you're kind of missing the point. I mean no offence at all, but you not feeling the need for an LFO plugin that can be used to control any MIDI accessible control in a DAW, including the "mixer functions", doesn't mean others don't or that you can achieve the same results by drawing envelopes.

I can think of quite a few uses for such a thing, and I'm certain someone with more imagination than me (and there are millions of such people out there) will come up with lots of uses that never occur to me.

Envelopes. Yes, it's possible to draw regular LFO-like functions as envelopes. Sort of. But if you want to experiment with different wave-forms, different LFO frequencies or simply change the envelope it involves a lot of work. And there are things that are seriously difficult to try and do by drawing envelopes.

Here's one example.

Let's say I decide I want a sine curve modulating a "widget controller" over two bars. OK, I can draw that. It's a bit of a pain if I want to try it over four bars as well, but let's assume two bars does the trick.

I now think "what would happen if I tried a frequency modulation on that envelope? How about a rising sawtooth over a period of an eighth note but with low amplitude? OK, let's try making that another sine instead.... and how about I ramp up the speed so the original wave period becomes two bars in this section.....?"

Drawing that kind of thing is slow at best and involves an awful lot of maths to work out the shape of the wave at best.

Use an LFO that can itself be modulated by another LFO and it becomes simple. Or at least the only difficulty becomes getting the LFO settings right, not drawing and re-drawing complex (or even simple) wave-forms.

And that's just scratching the surface. Not everyone thinks in tems of "a guitar sounds like and does "this", a piano sounds like and does "that"". And as for "whooshing" not being to your taste, millions of guitarists, synthesists and record buyers clearly disagree about that. Personal taste shouldn't enter into whether what someone finds a musically useful tool is provided or not.

Developing something like Logic's MIDI LFO and envelope plugin shouldn't be too onerous I would have thought. It's not even like it needs to be able to generate a sound. Be useful if it used more than the "ordinary" 128 7-bit MIDI steps though, maybe 14-bit instead. Not that 14 bits worth of values is likely to be needed, just something smoother than 128 to avoid the stepping problem.

tlw

sharke
It's not uncommon to hear electronic/synth elements mixed with real instruments these days. 

And hasn't been for what, 45+ years now? Even Kraftwerk's early stuff (including Autobahn) mixed "real" instruments with ("real" hardware) synths. Most of the surviving psychedelic/electronica originators and pioneers are now in their 60s and 70s, and some are making a more electronic kind of music than ever before and appealing to a very wide age spectrum. That the people on stage might be old enough to be their grandparents doesn't seem to matter to lots of younger people now, though it did to the youth of the 50s, 60s and 70s. Maybe it's because some of the boomer generation have refused to grow old gracefully :-)

Yeah I know that synths have always been played with real instruments. What I meant was (I didn't explain it well enough) was that the modern EDM production techniques of today are also being integrated into music of all genres. And the whole area of sound design has gotten a lot more complicated and involved what with the routing and modulation possibilities we have available to us today. 

Anderton
Why is ANYONE assuming I'm against an LFO tool? I haven't said ANYTHING that would lead anyone to believe I am against an LFO tool. If I misinterpreted what the OP wanted and didn't solve his problem, then that's my error. What I am against is saying that tools that are useable and have value are "horrible," then posting a video that's intended to show how horrible they are when I've never experienced those kinds of problems drawing a periodic waveform.

 
I guarantee you that if you asked 50 random Sonar users to use the shape tool to draw a sine curve of a specific size, position and shape, they'd have to screw around for ages to do it. That's what I'm talking about. Maybe "horrible" is a strong word, but then again, it's a word that springs to a lot of people's minds when they try to use a tool that's fiddly. One of the problem with drawing accurate shapes to order is that they are very sensitive to where you put the mouse. Like when you want to start a sine curve from 00:00:00 exactly, there's that uneasy feeling that you need to have the mouse pointer bang on target when dragging vertically to set the amplitude, and there's that grey area when the pointer is changing from the border dragging icon to the drawing pointer. It's so easy to be a little off in your mouse positioning and end up with something like this:
 

 
Not everyone is good with a mouse. I find it hard to work with very small and fiddly margins of pointer error sometimes. Same thing when I'm using Adobe Illustrator. 
 

I personally do not see an LFO tool as a huge priority compared to other feature requests that are relevant to ALL SONAR users of any age or musical inclination, like better controller support. This is why I ask questions about how relevant it is to people, instead of assuming that just because I consider something important, everyone else must think it's equally important. Also, not all newbies are interested only in beats, and people over 30 do know what beats are. Google "DJs over 40" sometime. I'm not into prejudice or stereotyping.

 
Yeah I'm well aware that there are plenty of people in their 40's and 50's who are into electronic music. I'm one of them. After all, the electronic dance music scene exploded in our youth, the late 80's and early 90's. Virtually everyone I know from back then is still into it. And yes, I know that not all newbies are into "beats." But that's where the bulk of the new DAW users are coming from - electronic bedroom production. The main reason being that you can produce complete commercial sounding tracks from start to finish on a laptop with a pair of headphones, wheres recording real instruments and bands is a whole different kettle of fish which involves a lot more investment, commitment and physical space. Like it or not, this is where the bulk of today's new DAW revenue is coming from. 
 

This is all about priorities, so I'll let you guys argue with the people who want better controller support, an improved staff view, variable speed, better MP4 video support, more arranging tools, a mastering page, DDP export, track sampler, new MIDI effects, parallel effects in FX Chains, having clip waveforms follow clip gain, etc. as to which is more important. I suspect an LFO tool would be relatively low on the list, but if I knew the answer, I wouldn't have asked the question.

 
But nobody is saying "we want an LFO tool instead of those things." It's just another suggestion in the long list of very useful things which would be great to have in Sonar.

sharke
But that's where the bulk of the new DAW users are coming from - electronic bedroom production.

 
The sales figures for music software that I've seen do not confirm that. It's a number of users that's of interest, but far from the bulk.
 

But nobody is saying "we want an LFO tool instead of those things." It's just another suggestion in the long list of very useful things which would be great to have in Sonar.

By definition, anything you want prioritized pushes something else further down the stack.
 
As to music, here's the reality. This mirrors the info from the IMS I attended two years ago (which I was asked to attend because of my long history with EDM, FWIW).
 

 
The people responsible for making 81% of the music that's consumed make music in those genres. That's the reality. I started doing "live performance DJ" gigs in Europe in 1999 and in the states shortly thereafter, but that's not where the majority of the market is at all. I'm okay with that because I like all kinds of music. But once "Simplicity" is released this week, my next project (with a 2018 release) will be "Joie De Vivre" - my attempt to re-invent EDM, which I feel has become stale because all those bedroom producers are using the same tools in the same ways. It is precisely because I don't want to sound like everyone else that I will be using SONAR.
 
None of this is to say more EDM-specific tools wouldn't be welcomed. I just don't feel any lack of same gets in the way of doing whatever I want to do musically.
 
 
 
 

The sales figures for music by genre are not likely to mirror the breakdown of new DAW customers by genre. 
 
First of all, the vast majority of people represented in that pie chart do not produce music. And like I said, certain genres of music lend themselves naturally to bedroom production, whereas others are more likely to be produced in professional studios. I am almost certain that electronic styles, whether it be dubstep or big room EDM or IDM or any of the other genres and sub-genres of electronica are more heavily represented among new DAW customers than rock music. There are a lot of bedroom hip hop producers, but they are just as likely to use electronic production techniques and fancy processing. Recording a rock band is a huge undertaking compared to making an EDM track, at least in terms of equipment and space needed. Rock tracks are not, by and large, being recorded in people's bedrooms. I'd hazard a guess that there are more bedroom based DAW customers than there are professional studio based DAW customers. 
 
The reason why EDM is perceived as having become stale is because the relatively low cost of getting started in EDM production has spawned thousands of more producers than there were before, many of questionable musical talent (go on any EDM forum and listen to endless questions like "How do I make a melody? How do I know which chords to put?"). The result is that there is a sea of very generic, musically bland EDM produced by kids who might have decent mixing skills but their sense of melody and harmony is very dull and unadventurous. The same was true to some extent back in the early days of house and techno - there were some really crap records floating around - but there were much less of them. Now what with the ease of access to music via streaming platforms, we're swamped with mediocre EDM tracks. You have to wade through oceans of it to find the good stuff. But there are also some very interesting producers out there. I'm not a fan of dubstep for example, but some of the arrangements I hear are insanely complicated and inventive. 
 
Anyway, the point is that regardless of overall listening habits, bedroom producing is heavily weighted toward electronic/sample based music, and that is what is driving new DAW sales (which must have skyrocketed over the past 15 years compared to what was being sold before). First-time DAW users are a young crowd in general, and they're just not making rock music as much as they're making EDM. Older DAW users are more likely to be "locked in" to their DAW of choice, and are a harder sale.

How that graph is sectioned off is a bit misleading.
 
I would look at that graph another way:  You COULD lump R&B/Hip-Hop, Pop, and EDM into one bigger class, a class that generally (and I mean generally) is known for using DAW's/plug-in's as primarily in a production environment as 'Bedroom Producers' (and not mixing/mastering only) and those genres would definitely find something like an LFO tool, slicers/samplers, etc useful.  If you do that, then the number is now at least 45% of ALL music, not even including parts of Rock and Pop that are using more EDM/Poppy type production techniques.

I was looking for an indication of UK (As I know bedroom producers of Dance music has been a big thing for over 2 decades, and not for rock), Europe and worldwide, from the same stat source (Neilson) from the year before.
 



https://www.musicbusiness...ca-rb-rules-streaming/
 
 

http://www.digitalmusicne...download-and-physical/
 
Contains this, but some others that contrast

I: Genres That Perform Best on Streaming

(Percentage of overall sales within each genre that come from Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, YouTube, Deezer, Rhapsody, Tidal, et. al.)

For a minute I thought I'd logged into KVR by mistake.
 
I'm not quite sure what US music listening habits have to do with how useful an LFO tool would be, but I think it is a great idea. The amount of time it could have saved me in the past, and the amount of fun that could be had moving forwards...
 
LFOs in FX Chains would be nice. But that leads to another wish list. 
 
I appreciate that Sonar has the tools for manipulating my audio, midi, controllers and so on in any way I could want, but sometimes those tools are a little bit cumbersome to use. 

Anderton
There already is an LFO tool...to elaborate on what Sanderxpander said, check out the waveform options in the automation Draw tool. What you can do with them is more flexible, useful, and customizable than what you could do with an LFO.

This "draw tool" is absolutely useless for people who wants REAL control - for EDM especially.
We need LFO(midi) clips that can be created and customized in fast way.
Yes i can do this with FL Studio, but...