Tidal oscillators with range modulate parameters as LFOs, smoothed via control busses

Tidal’s oscillator functions (sine, cosine, saw, square) output values from 0 to 1 over a cycle; wrapping one in range lo hi scales it to any parameter range, and slow/fast set its rate — together this is an LFO on any parameter. By default one oscillator value is sampled per event, which is smooth only when there are many events per cycle. For few, long events, a control bus (cutoffbus, panbus, …) with segment N samples the oscillator N times per cycle, producing a smooth continuous sweep instead of stepped values. This bridges pattern-based thinking with continuous modulation.

Examples

d1 $ s "bd*8" # pan (slow 4 $ sine)
d1 $ s "moog*16" # cutoff (range 200 2400 $ saw) # resonance 0.2
d1 $ s "moog" # cutoffbus 1 (segment 32 $ range 200 2400 $ saw) # resonance 0.2

Assessment

Sweep a synth’s cutoff with range 200 3000 $ sine. Then, for a pattern with one long event per cycle, use a control bus with segment 32 to make the sweep continuous, and explain why the bus is needed.