Bands and Modes

This page is the reference. How audio reactivity works gives you the mental model. Come back here while you are picking a band and a mode for a specific control.

You see this exact list live when you open a control’s audio source picker, described step by step in per-parameter modulation. Each entry there shows a small bar that reacts to the incoming sound, so you can watch a band move before you commit to it.

Signals

These are the continuous, always-on measurements. They rise and fall smoothly with the music instead of snapping on a single moment.

Overall: the track’s general loudness across the whole spectrum, not weighted toward any particular frequency range.
Bass: energy in the low end, roughly 20–250 Hz. Kicks, sub, and low bassline movement live here.
Mid: roughly 250–2000 Hz. Most vocals, synth leads, and the body of a bassline sit in this range.
Mid-High: roughly 2000–8000 Hz. Presence and bite: the upper harmonics of vocals and leads, snare crack.
High: roughly 8000–20000 Hz. Hi-hats, cymbals, air, and sparkle.
Beat: fires only when RENDERWAVE detects an actual beat. It sits at zero between beats and cannot fire faster than about every 150 milliseconds, so it stays steady even on fast, busy material.
Onset: how much is changing across the whole spectrum right now. Busy, transient-heavy passages push it up; sparse or sustained passages let it settle low.

Bass, Mid, Mid-High, and High are each continually rescaled against their own recent peak, the same “no manual gain” idea covered in how audio reactivity works. A quieter track can still drive a control through its full assigned range.

Hits

Hits are transient detectors, one per band. Each one spikes to full strength the instant that band has a sudden onset, then decays back to zero. Only the strike registers, nothing sustained.

Bass Hit: fires on a kick or bass transient.
Mid Hit: fires on a snare, clap, or mid-range transient.
Mid-High Hit: fires on upper-mid transients, such as snare crack or percussive leads.
High Hit: fires on hi-hats, shakers, and other bright, fast hits.

Presence

Presence bands run a long, slow-moving average, roughly a three-second time constant, that reflects whether a frequency range has been consistently active rather than whether it just spiked. Where Hits catch the strike, Presence tracks the hold.

Bass Presence: has the low end been solidly filled for the last few seconds, or is it thin right now.
Mid Presence: same idea for the mid range.
High Presence: same idea for the top end.

Use Presence when you want a control to track the overall character of a section, like a bass-heavy drop versus a stripped-back breakdown, instead of jittering with every hit.

Modulation modes

A mode is the motion shape your assigned band produces. The band sets when and how fast movement happens, the mode sets what shape it takes, and the Range you set on the control sets how far it travels.

Loop

A continual sawtooth: the value ramps from the low end of Range to the high end, then snaps back to the low end and starts over. The assigned band sets how fast it cycles. It does not change how far it swings, since that is always the full Range you configured.

Ping Pong

A triangle wave: the value ramps from low to high, then back down to low, and repeats. Same idea as Loop, but it bounces instead of snapping. The assigned band sets the bounce rate.

Hit

A trigger-and-decay spike. The control sits at the low end of Range until the assigned band fires a trigger edge, then jumps toward the high end and decays back down. The Hit Count control, in the global audio controls (see the audio panel), sets how many trigger edges have to pass before it fires. Set it higher to thin a busy source into an occasional accent instead of a hit on every edge.

Fade

Direct audio-follow. The control’s value tracks the assigned band’s live level, mapped straight into Range: quiet reads near the low end, loud reads near the high end. While Fade is active it replaces the slider’s fixed value with the moving audio level. When the signal drops to silence, Fade eases back to whatever you had the slider set to rather than snapping to the bottom of Range.

Which band suits which mode

There is no hard restriction here, any band works with any mode, but some pairings read better:

Loop and Ping Pong want a band that keeps moving, so they read best off Signals: Overall, Bass, Mid, Mid-High, High, or Onset. A steadily present source gives you a steady cycle rate.
Hit wants a clear, discrete moment, so it reads best off Beat or one of the Hit bands.
Fade works with anything, since it is just mapping the live value straight into Range. Presence bands make Fade read as a slow drift; Hit bands make it read as a snap.

Next steps

Per-parameter modulation: assign a band and mode to a specific control, step by step.
Tuning audio response: fix a reaction that feels too twitchy or too flat.
How audio reactivity works: the mental model behind all of this.
BPM and tap tempo: the beat-grid side of reactivity, separate from these bands.