Skip to content
RENDERWAVERENDERWAVE

Beat-Synced Visuals

Tempo affects your visuals in two ways. Keep them separate.

Pace vs. lock

Section titled “Pace vs. lock”

Pace is the overall speed your visuals move at. RENDERWAVE ties a shader’s general motion to the current BPM instead of running it on a fixed clock: dial the tempo up and things move faster, dial it down and things ease off. This applies no matter which of the four tempo sources set that BPM: Link, audio auto-detect, tap tempo, or manual.

Lock lands a visual on a specific moment (a pulse, a shape change, a flash) exactly on the beat or on the downbeat of the bar, not moving at roughly the right speed.

Lock runs from any tempo source, and precision differs

Section titled “Lock runs from any tempo source, and precision differs”

Whatever tempo source is currently active drives beat- and bar-locked motion: Link, audio auto-detect, tap tempo, or manual all drive it. As long as RENDERWAVE has a BPM, which it always does, a visual built to accent the beat or the bar will do so.

What differs between sources is precision over a long set, not whether the lock works at all:

  • Link stays synced. RENDERWAVE keeps re-aligning its beat position to Link’s shared clock, so the lock holds accurate even hours into a set.
  • Audio, tap, and manual all drive the beat grid from a running count seeded by the current BPM. It keeps time once it’s going, but nothing re-syncs it to the music the way Link does, so small drift can creep in over a long stretch, on tap or manual most of all, where nothing external corrects the BPM itself.

For most of a set you won’t notice this difference. Reach for Link when you want drift-free precision over a long, unbroken run. Audio auto-detect, tap, and manual all work fine for getting locked visuals moving with the room.

Confirm the grid visually

Section titled “Confirm the grid visually”

The tempo panel includes a small ring visualizer alongside the BPM readout: the outer ring completes one full rotation per bar, the inner ring completes one rotation per beat, and the center flashes on every beat. Watch it to see where RENDERWAVE puts the beat, and to confirm the grid is moving before you go looking for it in a visual.

The compact BPM widget in the top bar does the same without opening anything: its glowing edge pulses once per beat, so you get a pulse readout whether or not the tempo panel is open.

Practical guidance

Section titled “Practical guidance”
  • For a long, unbroken set where drift-free precision matters, use Ableton Link whenever the room supports it.
  • Audio auto-detect, tap tempo, and manual BPM all drive beat-locked accents too. Nothing resyncs them to an external clock the way Link does, so treat them as reliable sync that can drift over a very long run rather than sample-accurate.

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”