11.8: Free Hand Drawing

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Well the looping tour was rather involved, so let’s turn to something a little more, shall we say, artistic. That little something is called Free Hand Drawing. It’s kind of like painting with sound. You can draw arbitrary wave shapes! As an extreme example, you could draw an entire sound by hand. This is no small feat, though, and is best left to lunatics, millionaires, and other people with lots of time on their hands. Usually, Free Hand Drawing is used to smooth out discontinuities due to cut-and-paste splicing operations. It can also be used to smooth out clicks or other extraneous impulse noises from source material. (Please be advised that sampling sounds from albums and CDs is normally a copyright infringement, and as such, is against the law. Please respect the artist’s rights). In this example, you can just have a little fun with it, and forget about being serious for a moment.

To use Free Hand Draw, select the button that looks like a pencil (or select the Mode/Free Hand Draw menu item). The mouse pointer will turn into a pencil. In order to draw with the pencil, the wave must be magnified to the point where it is no longer filled in. Trying to draw at a lower magnification could destroy the wave, so Wrench automatically disables the pencil for you. Once you’ve zoomed in far enough, place the pencil over the wave. Press the left mouse button and sweep the mouse from left to right as if you were writing. Notice how the old wave is overwritten with one from the pencil. When you release the mouse button, drawing stops and the exact shape of your new wave segment is calculated and redrawn. As long as you are in this mode, you can keep pushing the mouse button and drawing! If you move from right to left, the pencil will erase the preceding wave segment, so that you can redraw over the segment without releasing the mouse button. If you decide that you don’t like what you just drew, move back over it to erase it and then release the mouse button. By doing this, Wrench will ignore the drawing and replace it with what you started with. As with all of Wrench’s functions, the Undo feature works on Free Hand Drawing as well. You may find the backward erase action of the pencil to be quicker, though. Before you leave this section, return to Normal Mode by selecting the Normal Mode pushbutton which looks like a regular mouse pointer (or by selecting Mode/Normal). The pencil pointer should be replaced by the standard pointer.