Making automation more performance oriented?

I feel like horizontal automation lanes aren't conceptually aligned with the rest of audiomulch. I mean, one aspect of AM that I really appreciate is that when I'm working with the patcher window it breaks out of the left to right flow of other sequencers and it's just sounds moving forward in time. I also feel that AM is strongly performance oriented, but automation is more stagnant.

I like using the patcher to compose as I end up either using my imagination more or just going with the flow as it were.

I was wondering what everyone else's thought on automation were?

I have some rough thoughts on reframing the way we interact with the automation without breaking or changing the way things work now…. Hopefully! :)

I'm thinking there'd be a button in a contraption's properties window that brings up a table with boxes for entering "start" and "end" bars, a "position" box, a "repeat" box and a "do it" button. The table would display all enabled automatable parameters of the contraption.

"Start" and "End" would either reflect the selection you've made with the mouse in the automation pane or if you enter numbers manually the selection in the automation pane would change to match that.

What I think makes this a novel addition is that the "position" box would be relative to the playhead position, defaulting to 1 bar. "Do it" would copy and paste your selection in a destructive processes just as if you selected that automation range with the mouse and used either used keyboard shortcuts or menu commands.

Repeat is just how many times paste is hit.

The way I envision this working is that you would record some automation live or setup a small amount to begin with and then as you are playing you could pull up this table and tell AM "take what I did from bars 7 to 11 and do it again 3 times 1 bar fromt now."

There would also be a button in the automation pane that brings up this same table, but it only shows the automation channels you have selected. And thus it could work across multiple contraptions.

I also think this would address requests for LFO style behavior in a more interesting way.