unclassifiable VST effects

[ please note: there are two addendums tacked onto the end of this since I first posted it ]

I refer here to “unclassifiable” inasmuch as not falling into the already-named effect types. I’m not talking merely “step-sequencer-modulated phaser” or an admittedly wordy “multiband tube emulating soft saturation and speaker simulation” but effects that, since we’ve not used or even encountered them enough times to have a traditional (or merely trendy) predesignated function for them, nor a common coinage by which to refer to them. Granted, there’s quite a few overarching DSP categories that we speak of as though they’re a singular effect when really they indicate a rather broad range of effects, such as “granulization” or “buffer delay” effects.

If I was an academic I’d trace the process from the invention of a new sound/effect to it’s adoption by a subgenre to the habituation of the general listening audience to expecting that effect to be identified with said subgenre and it’s codification in specific, narrow useage situations.

For instance the buffer override “stutter” effect. Or the “cher”/overblown autotune effects rather startling migration from the cheesiest of dance music to faux-gangsta rap almost exclusively commenting upon how the lyricist would rather like to have sex with the stripper he’s observing (um… duh)… I really genuinely am surprised by the pairing of robot vocals with “serenades to renumerated ecdysiasts via pleonastic tautologies” as a top-10 rap phenomenon. I heard that the owners frown on such behavior and have the bouncers thrash you into the street. But I digress…

Here’s some VST effects that often get overlooked because, well, they’re hard to describe, and not always easy to pull the name of the plug-in long after discovering it’s uncategorizable effect…

I’ll start with my two favorites:

Lost Technology by Transvaal Audio (who I see today seems to have slipped off the face of the web much to my distress!). Lost Tech is ostensibly a resynthesis effect. Personally, I tend to categorize resynthesis effects as “something more than effect” since it entirely replaces the original audio but in this case I’ll make an exception. Lost Tech is quite able to capture the envelope characteristics of the incoming audio and turn it into… a gelatinous, shattered-mica version of the original. Plus it has some of the most original modulation options I’ve ever encountered and does things like “freeze” the frequency response of the resynthesis or exagerate tonalities somehow… really, you have to hear it and even once you do there’s a wide range of possible sounds that can come out!

Darrel Tam’s DtBlkFx is my other top favorite effect. At base it’s a spectral multifx processor with a cascading “waterfall” type spectral frequency window so you can see the spectrum of the incoming audio and also what it looks like after it’s passed through the cataracts of DtBlkFx. First, there’s “masks” that you can use to select only the frequencies, or harmonics, or threshholds, that are actually going to be affected by the selectable effects algorithms of which you can choose up to eight in series. Possible effects include pitch shifting harmonics, change the contrast between loud and soft frequencies, phase smearing, precision parameteric equalization, vocoding, spectral vocoding, convolution-like morph mixing and two other bizarre sidechain (between the left and right channels of the input, so you’ll have to use hard panning for these) mix effects… there’s actually too may possibilities to get into here. Suffice it to say that most of the coolest stuff it can do is something you’ve likely never heard. One of my favorites is achieving that “timestretching grainy artifact” sound without actual timestretching. Resample, reverse a frequency in time over a certain range, harmonic repitching, power-matching the timbre to a selection of Triangles,Squares, Saws, Pointy, or Sweep wave envelopes… like I said, there’s no words for these sounds.

Christian Kleine’s pluggo-created bitxoe VST “generates high crisp audio audio effect” (mine works under WinXP via the free Pluggo runtime… some plug-ins, like Ambienter seem to be missing from his new site, and for all I know the new versions only work on Macs so be forewarned)

Dexter’s trigosynth effect and logriser (the logriser is a beta and new to me! whereas trigosynth is unhelpfully described as “.an expierment everything is sent through a trig effect” and to my ear sounds like audio run straight through a math module in SynthEdit)

destroyFxs dfx Geometer (”Geometer is a visually oriented waveform geometry plugin. It works by generating some “points” or “landmarks” on the waveform, moving them around and messing them up, and then reassembling the wave from the points. Each of these three stages can be done in a variety of ways, combining to make millions of different effects.”) If you haven’t already tried this you’re crazy! They also have Scrubby, Transverb (a delay with 2 independent read heads and variable buffer play speed which is utterly superb), Polarizer, rez synth (”Rez Synth allows you to “play” bandpass resonant filter banks that process your sound. In the right hosts, MIDI notes can trigger individual filters or banks of filters (up to 30 per note) with controllable frequency separation), VST Midi App (”VST MIDI is a little program that lets you explore the wonders of MIDI-controlled effects. Unfortunately, most VST softwares do not support sending MIDI notes and such to effects plugins, so this is an easy way for you to use our fancy, MIDI-hungry effects if your software can’t handle that kind of thing. With VST MIDI, you can play a sound file, load a VST effect, control the effect with a MIDI instrument or the on-screen keyboard, and save the results to a sound file”) which even supports drag’n'drop loading of VST .dlls and the indispensible Buffer Override.

Waka x (Felix Petrescu from Makunouchi Bento) collection of VSTs is here on rekerd.org. He’s made the “Mouse” family of VSTs which are 4- or 8-band pitch shifters with individual level controls (and let me tell you I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of splitting a sound into 8 bands and automating the pitch shift of each band!!!), Limun Shaper (and 8-band waveshaper topped off with a limiter), radio Gloria (”radio Gloria 0.9 Beta, simulates old romanian distorted radio sound. Use left controls for static properties and right controls for volume and output”), eLEKT Fx v1.0 (”simulates static interferences and nasty electric charges applied random to your sound source. The sound will be damaged for a while.”) as well as the original Makunouchi Bento (”Experimental ring modulator: A vst plugin custom-developed by Big Tick… and finally released as free software. This plugin ring-modulates incoming audio with sine waves of continuously varying frequency, and runs the result through a state-variable filter. It can often produce unexpected effects, from stuttering rhythms to ambient tones”). I see offZet on his homesite now, a new VST instrument “offset sample streamer for live acts and improvisation” that’s new to me. You may also know him as the creator of Pink Ninja standalone wave slice application made famous by Prefuse 73.

Pretty much everything by NDC, the most uncharacterizable of which is Cycle Shifter v1.02 (”reads in a cycle’s-worth of the input signal, then (once the whole cycle’s been read in) outputs it again, on top of the current output. Works best with long/sustained sounds (e.g. strings, pads etc.), sounds like a weird kind of gentle distortion”) or perhaps Amplitude Imposer (”Takes 2 stereo inputs and imposes the amplitude envelope of the first one on the second one. Also has a threshold level for the second input, so that when the signal falls below it, it is amplified up to the threshold, to give a greater signal to be amplitude modulated. You’ll need a relatively flexible host, i.e. one that allows you to have 4 inputs and 2 outputs for an effect”) but the one that’ll always be closest to my heart is The Modulator 2 becuase it’s one of the only Frequency Modulation effects (it does ringmod and amplitude modulation, too) and the only thing I could ask of it is to have 2 inputs so I could sidechain 2 channels so that one would frequency modulate the other… it does have internal oscillators or wav. sample loading. Other legendary plug-ins include Fragmental (inspired by Shamann ;)) which we talked about here recently, Buffer Synth (buffer override playable by midi notes), Feedback-y Thing, Reversinator, Rhythmic Metalisation Delay, Random Pattern Delay, Distortionator Mk2 (distortion and “sine wave” distortion), Spongerific Audio Toaster (like a “guitar synth” sine generator but tracks the frequency of the incoming audio via zero-crossing detection and thus tracks laudably poorly and spastically), and Tempo Sync Reverer!

xoxos’ Waterverb beta VST made to simulate an “underwater” reverb, scroll down a ways in that post… and put a limiter after it! [ edit ] Apparently in my haste to write all this the first time through I forgot to add all of his other unique VSTfx! An odd oversight considering their originality and their ubiquity in my deranged soundscape projects. There’s a whole long section devoted to them in the second addendum at the end now [ end edit ]

elogoXa’s now-ancient but still unique VSTs, including the effects +armónicos 2 (to “improve” harmonic content… but is an uncontrollable and strange, abstract thing), Flange Distortion Mixer (”mixer with several effect routing possibilities: flanger-distortion, frequency filter, soft distortion, overdrive and crusher. You have control over the level and pan of each send, and all of them can be used at the same time”) and to the, to me, indispensible Kriptonia!!! (”the incoming audio is first processed by an encryption algorithm, based on the displacement of frequencies along the audio spectrum, and then it passes through a comb fiter and a SV filter. This SV filter can be modified by using a 16-step LFO, which controls filter frequency, filter resonance and encryption mode”). Note the “panel select” drop-down selector: it allows access to the other “page” of the GUI where there’s a step sequencer for the bottom row of modulation routings… “encryption filtering” actually sounds much like you’d imagine. The “mixer” part on the right side of the GUI is very important as the “encryption filter” output is almost always vastly softer than the other filter types if you have them turned on… note the filters are parallel, and not sequential: the “encrypted” audio is not send through the resonant filters but is a separate audio stream that’s mixed before the plug-in’s output with the aforementioned mixer section.

RoughtDraftAudio/DSP’s MuLore (”exploring telephone compansion algorithms.. check wikipedia for Mu law and A law… variable ‘constants’ of Mu and A [right clicking them allows direct access to their normal values... the big triangle allows constant xfade between the dry signal and the two algorithms"). [ edit: I added a ton more VSTs and comments thereon in the second addendum below ]

p0k’s indecipherable “multi-parameter” waveshaper called Uguisu Effect.

our friend liqih’s Kaotica (”a 12db/octave band pass filter modulated by a “Fractal” LFO. The key of the effect is the Mu parameter, it’s the seed for the fractal shape, for each value of Mu you got a different LFO waveform: sometimes close to a random behaviour, other times performing cyclic patterns. Each value leads to a unique shape. You can set the LFO rate in Hz and the Hardness of the LFO waveform: smooth or hard jumps,” Glitch One Effect Synthesizer (unique modulation multifx), Groove Analogizer (audio-controlled drum synth), and Kazootonica effects (this used waveshaping to make it sound like your audio is being run through a kazoo!)

Phasic’s PHMultishaper (4 waveshapers with an X-Y mixer in the middle) and PHInterfere (”a unique sounding lo-fi/interference effect that modulates and mixes pink noise with the incoming signal, giving a grainy/interference style of distortion”).

AcmeBarGig’s Red Shift (”Red Shift allows you to replace the tone of your guitars pickup with a huge list of different alternatives and really provides you the versatility you need without having to spend money on several guitars! 3 separate volume controls: Pickup, Material and Master. 2 bypass switches (Material and Red Shift) various pickup types and materials, including weird ones like concrete, spleen and human tissue”). Needless to say you needn’t use this on an electric guitar… they are mysteriously releasing one freeware plug-in per week!?

Bo Johansen’s Wave changer 3! I was utterly in love with Wavechanger2 and I can assure you I’m impressed and stunned that this classic has gotten an upgrade! It “replaces your sound waves with simple waveforms” so presumably it’s a resynthesis effect, like a guitar synth stompbox. I learned that it’s a more magical effect than that when, long ago, I hooked my Photon X25’s 3D infrared-theremin midi controler’s x/y/z to the plug-in’s wave distortion, transpose and threshhold parameters… there’s nothing quite like it when automated.

mda’s ancient VST collection includes Round Panner (to place a sound outside the stereo field), and Re-Psycho the “event-based pitch shifter.”

Vellocet’s Fractal Distortion, Logic Distortion, and Phazor (FFT randomized subband phase)… I still use their NoPhones binaural effect, Ringmod (because it has a level-triggered LFO, actually 2 of them, with nice modulation options) and Spectral Shifter (there’s just not a lot of FFT shifter VSTs).

MST’s Warp (with pitch, glitch, time and feedback it’s a strange effect) and ReSynFx (granular resynthesis effect!!! midi-note playable with 8-stage, loopable amp, pitch, grain rate and filter envelopes, VitaLimiter based on the classic Vitalizer Psycho-Acoustic Enhancer, the key-tracking filters are up to 8-poles, chorus with BMP-Repeat which resets the modulation at the start and most parameters have a mix level control). I should check with MST about whether he’s ever going to release his secret alpha Triglyceride, a resonant effect which I love using.

Jez Wells‘ Ether, Shapee and Wavethresh VSTs. CAUTION: “Before you can use any of the plugins you need to install the files contained in this zip file in to the windowssystem32 folder of your computer.” WaveThresh does “spectral thresholding… the process of dividing an input signal up into frequency bands (spectral), removing (or reducing) those components that lie above or below a certain level (thresholding) and then constructing the output signal from these modified spectral components. WaveThresh is designed to be a creative sound processing tool offering unusual filtering and distortion effects although spectral thresholding can be used as a crude single-ended noise reduction process (not recommended by this author though).” Shapee does “spectral shaping” and Ether does “spectral composting” but ultimately they’re sidechain morphing/spectral vocoding-type effects. You must route two different signals into these plug-ins to get the effect.

Jeez I just stumbled across this post on KVR with a ton of old VSTs redistributed in a single .zip file. The abstract/inexplicable ones include: Smartelectronix KT Granulator and Bouncy (bouncing ball delay) which are both much-used in my music, HNM Wavelet (a compression algorithm filter??), the once-upin-a-time much-overused Multilens (four bandpass filters, which are arranged in parallel in the stereo panorama, as well as a distortion and a delay unit. Every bandpass filter owns a frequency LFO and a bandwith LFO which influence the filters characteristic. The combination of the eight LFOs results in an almost randomly sounding output), our friend SynthGeek’s Arm FX (which is a whole friggin’ midi-played synth used as a ringmod effect), ShinyFX’s Spectral Monkeyage and PhazVoc, Plogue’s Rebuilder (spectral resynthesis) and Mixed Grains (a sidechain-morph type effect, granularly mixing two mono audio inputs), Nullpointer’s Z-Ringer (Bitcrusher-lowpassfilter-Ringmod-comb filter), Z-SpShift (phase-vocoder pitchshifter, with controls for shift size/direction, range to shift, and band modulation) and Z-SpVoc (spectral Vocoder, with scaling, smearing and carrier wave modulation) which I still use all the time and hadn’t realized had disappeared from the web!

ddummer’s TbT Laidback-er (which displaces the high and low frequencies, theoretically giving drums a laid-back feel but potentially used elsewise) and TbT Tapestop,

iopolong’s‘ resolator, flotser (feedback/aliasing effect), sloper (stuter-stretch delay) plus some even more complex buffer effects.

Broken Gadget’s Chime Machine can still be found on Gersic… “The Chime Machine effect started life as a spatial enhancer, and then mutated into the comb filtering delay machine it is today. There are four comb filters/delay units inside Chime Machine, and a novel automatic dynamic routing system. As the name suggests, Chime Machine specialises in producing chiming, spatial effects.” The itallics I added I love automating Chime Machine.

Habib’s keFIR, a “zero latency, FIR filter based on impulse responses loaded from wave files. Filter length can be adjusted to maximum of 32K taps” which essentially means that it’s a convolution effect for such things as amp simulation of the like but it’ll load any .wav file so that allows for a near infinitude of possibilities.

Azertopia’s Stempel vocoder (two-input sidechain type effect!) which has a better resoltion that a traditional vocoder plus “the effect features a two states morph-able spectral equalizer, a linear frequency shifter on each input channel,’ and the recently updated ADopplerEn2… the first version was a Dopplering effect I loved to death whereas the new one “The effect consists of eight parallel similar audio processing chain which are composed of a delay tape reader, a stereo panner, a multi mode filter and an amplitude modulator. Each sub block of the processing chain can be modulated (delay, filter cutoff frequency, stereo position, amplitude) by one of the eight low frequency oscillators. All lfos are similar, they can produce various standard shapes and can be synced between themselves” plus UltraTriggerFx which is a multifx unit meant to have it’s effects triggered live via midi CC, notes or buttons on the GUI (I own a touchscreen)… what sets it apart is that it has a scratcher, flanger, phaser, decimator/bitcrusher, realtime slicer, “ring accumulator” (!?), frequency modulation with channel-specific carrier frequency, reverser, frequency shifter, granular pitch shifer, granular pitch accumulator, granulator, resonant filter, Doppler, chorus and multitap delay!

doveraudio’s crazy labyrinth of rarely-documented effects… my personal favorites are prob (”uses a bpm clock to send an impulse to a probability generator in hopes of triggering modulation and feedback envelopes”), daisypusher in its various incarnations (”the device tries to detect the intensity of incoming audio and respond to it by triggering envelopes to create bizarre warping effects and timestretched stuff,” SFXUNIT (some sort of impossible to describe multifx armada of uncategorizable DSP effects!), and Quiet XL which is most likely the only probabalistic/FSU compressor/compander/amplitude modulation genie… oh and his various non-linear stutterers, probabalistic wet/dry control plug-ins, betaOnionFx, dubbsack, nonameyet, micrasync, STFU, resinmental… all indescribable - and there’s many more and not even I can always remember what they do

Jeremy Ever’s Atlantis Filter (which comes along with the main Atlantis VST synth download). This is truly a multifx unit, and many of those effects are not the standard kind of DSP you’re used to getting in a VST. When combined with the extensive modulation possibilities (not to mention the randomization button with the ability to randomize only certain sections like the delay or the modulation settings…) it’s really amazing. All the normal resonant filters are there plus “harmonic” filtering, formant morph filter, flange chorus, flange vibrato, a wide array of distortions including “remapping,” octaver fuzz, bit imploder and destroyverb, a great delay/reverb section plus envelope, LFO, midi note, velocity, pitchbend and CC, and envelope follower modulation routable to just about anything, including other mod sources.

mutagene’s various “warped filter” and comb filter VSTs with such odd traits 2WarpDelay’s “feedback delay featuring 2 frequency-warped lattice filters in the feedback paths. Lattice filter coefficients are scanned from a bitmap that can be user definable or are extracted in real-time from the input signal” or Macomate 88’s comb filters having “feedback path featuring 2nd order filter selectable LP, HP, BP, BS and all pass. Filter is tuned to midi event on channel 2 (using the loaded .TUN map)” in other words the combs can be tuned to microtonal Scala temperaments!

Sobotonoj’s VSTs ENTWEDER, MO-RODER and MISTORDER all of which are miraculously sound-mangling “dub echo scrubbing” effects with extras thrown in. I cannot get enough of automating Mistoder B (the non-midi-triggered version, available in the “plug-in pack.”

andrew burgess’s dirtsky “is a frickin’ mess… on one side it’s a grain-based mangler similar to gleck, but with more control. On the other side it’s a 3 way harmonizer with independent pitch controls. You can set the wet/dry value of the effect in general and the amount of dirt and/or sky to your liking.” and he’s got some other nice granulization and unique rhythmic filter/gates. Requires Pluggo runtime for the Windows VST versions!

st3pan0va’s sp3ctr3, a spectral effect that warps and alters the harmonics and partials and more.

concreteFx’s great, old freebies like Chimecho (spectral delay), Revz (spectral reverser ), SpectGate (spectral gate), SpectRing (spectral ringmododulator) and a bunch more, mostly more traditional. You know you’re jaded when you think “is a spectral ringmodulator really that uncategorizable…

tweakbench has many lovely effects like sideslip “a granular pitch shifter effect with an internal variable length step sequencer. it allows you to modify pitch and grain size for each step, as well as edit start, end, and sequencer modes, and granular envelope type for a wide variety of effects. breakdown can be hand set to create gentle rythimc pitch corrections, or completely destroy a loop or sample by granular deconstruction. feel free to use the patch randomizer for some creative inspiration.”

Let’s all add to this list as we find new effects that can’t quite be put into words…

“The message exceeds the maximum allowed length (20000 characters)”

…which is why I posted it here in the blog and not in the forums!

[ addendum 1 ]

googma’s DiVerSe has a great freeware VST pack (I seem to recall KickMe! Too VST, for which I have presets to download from my homesite, being made by gooma). Apparently they’ve got a company that sells Scope modules. Congrats! The VST pack includes SLowEr (a tapestop-type effect with a multipoint graphical “slope designer” to govern the curve of speeding up your audio to slowing it down), FreeZZZZZer 2 (an audio buffer freezer, the freeze time can be automated by envelope or midi pitchbend, and differet note lengths can be “played” via midi notes, from a whole bar to 1/128th note, dotted and triplets included, making it easy to create granular loops or pseudo-timestretching), rideR (a deeply-midi-controllable two-lfo tremolo and amplitude modulation effect with a “unique tremolo deforn control” X-Y pad - I note from the GUI that one of the possible midi inputs is “breath control!”), as well as a bunch of other effects and some synths that I’m going to have to test out now. I’ve been recommending SLowEr VST for quite a while now but I couldn’t remember where I’d gotten it.

Krakli’s X-Citer VST: “Definitely one for all of you who like weird sound fx. This one splits the signal into 4 tunable freq bands and then uses the signal as an impulse for an fm oscillator. The Pitch can be altered manually or swept by an LFO. This one loves to be fiddled with in realtime… Works best on harmonically rich input signals.” I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware that there was a multiband, pitch-tracking FM synth effect!

[ addendum 2: more xoxos, Duncan Parons & Jeroen Breebaart! ]

I somehow forgot to add to my comments on many plug-ins of three of my favorite sound design artists! Here I’ve corrected that egregious oversight:

xoxos: Most everything xoxos makes is wonderful and innovative, and much of it is freeware or cheap-as-hell payware that’s well, well worth supporting his mad scientist work! Effects I didn’t mention when I posted this include Acoustic (”a simple acoustic body resonator model, consisting of a first order mass-spring for modeling the Helmholtz or ‘air’ frequency, and a banded waveguide” in other words a physically modeled guitar body resonance emulator but, given that it’s all just “algorithms” it can be twisted and automated to create, well, unclassifiable special effects amd I can think of only one other “instrument body resonator” effect), sandh (”periodically captures a wavecycle and ‘freezes’. An audio ’sample & hold’ effect” - a description that hardly does this plug-in justice as.the conjunction of it’s s&h lfo, step sequenced, and envelope modulation of the buffer delay can create quite amazingly out-there stutters and the like, especially if you’re like me and you love to automate this innocuous monster), muchacho (a related tempo synced - in divisions of half or a third of the beat with shuffle! - buffer override effect with a step sequencer which allows you to set the probability of different length stutters occuring on the beat in question and including a beats-per-bar control for time signature choice or for that matter polyrhythms against the back beat - and I’ll admit right here I don’t really understand the incredibly tiny manual’s description of what the “user” area controls do! - this effect is the companion to Ordinate to help facilitate “high-rate” fills for algorithmic drum beats), muchcha (a granulator with a tempo-synced probability-based step sequencer with left/right independent variation controls and phase offset for even greater time-domain audio modulation), servo (step sequenced sample rate decimator/bitcrusher effect modulated by an algorithmic sequencer with pulse per quarter note and beats-per-bar controls), Outdoorverb (a sparse algorithmic reverb for large spaces and thus useful for almost any mix to give one track that certain depth-of-field that sets it apart from the others), Plate (”the ‘near reflections’ of this reverb are produced by a rectangular network of delays. specifying the size of the ‘plate’ and the location of the input generates timbral modes that suggest vibrating rectangles, which they have now; fyi the network consists of 2 delays along each edge [one for each direction] and 2 between opposite corners for a total of 12 interconnected delay paths. 4 more delays carry the input to each corner. the ‘bottom left’ and ‘bottom right’ corners are tapped [from the diagonal returns at these corners] for stereo output” with controls for height, width, and x/y controls “position the input, analogue to the location of the transducer on a physical plate. beyond strongly colouring the timbre, these settings also set the initial delay”), gate3 (a rhythm gate which has xoxos’ great “0 or 2 or 3″ beat divisor control, 0 indicating non-host synced with two LFOs as modulation souces and a listbox allowing you to choose what parameters are modulated for complex cross-rhythm gating patterns), formant shifer (the formant “shift is accomplished by stretching wavecycles” - created until a “better freeware one comes along” and it hasn’t, sadly), channelswap (”applies the host-synced algorithmic patterning engine used by other plugins with same GUI style to switch left and right channels” which makes it an algorithmic autopanner, I believe; I find this a nice effect for setting a sound apart from the rest of the mix, but also for odd stereo-based effect tricks such as using it modularly to automate channel-swapping between 2 tracks of input prior to an effect which requires hardpanned left and right audio such as a vocoder, DtBlkFx’s mix effects, Jez Wells’ Ether or Shapee [see below], etc.thus rhythmically switching which track provides the “carrier” and which the “modulator,” for example), discipline3 (a multi-tap delay randomizer with similar modulation options to his other effects to create “random audio segmentation”), Smoky Joe (an old, very glitchy wavecycle-stretching formant shifter, suitable for FSU applications), smoky joe (”an old, very glitchy wavecycle-stretching formant shifter, suitable for FSU applications”), and finally ckpitchshifter (which is just a “wrapper” for Chris Kerry’s pitch shifting SynthEdit module but useful for that as it has range, phase, rate, amount, shift, window (see below), choice of shifting algorithm, delay time, feedback, wet/dry and tempo-sync numerator and denominator controls (!!!) and further more the “’snap’ button snaps pitch to the nearest semitone; the psola method processes audio in windows… the length of this window is selectable from 1 ms to 200 ms. at higher settings, you will hear a doubling as windows are overlapped. harmonic distortion similar to downsampling is produced at very low settings; according to chris, generally algorithms A or C should be used for shifts over 2 semitones; algorithms B or D are best used for small shifts [detuning] and uses less cpu; the phase parameter indicates phase offset of the second channel. the unmarked button selects sine or random waveform” - when you’re taken the time to consider what all this plug-in is capable of I’m sure you’ll agree the overly-modest description on www.xoxos.net doesn’t really do it justice. As with most such things imaginative useage is the esoteric path to sound design wizardry.

RoughDraftAudio/DuncanParsons is also the mastermind behind PanGloss from the KVR 2007 Developer Challenge (”a multiband panner, which splits the incoming stereo into 6 or 9 individually controllable mono channels, which are then merged back together and output as a single stereo pair” with channel and “band” mute options which is nice to kill all sub-bass or the like and obviously given the plug-in’s right-click midi learn feature you can use this like a DJ’s eq killer, and a “center” control which removes the 3 bands that are split into the center of the stereo field so you’re left with just the left and right panned material). DSP is also one big brain behind BetaBugs (the website for which has been down since February 2009) which has given us the nearly-free Computer Music Betabugs Audio Vascillator (”a semi-modular effects unit that combines delay, filtering, envelope following and various other modules to create a flexible processing environment: Delay line in two modes - free running up to 4 seconds, with tapper for setting live tempos or sync to host from 1demisemihemidemisemiquavertriplet (1/128 triplet) up to a breve (2/1 Note); a resonant 24dB/Oct LP/BP/HP, Envelope Follower for modulating the filter cutoff, with adjustable sensitivity and slope controls. Choice of 4 modes, depending on how the filter should be modulated in relation to a defined frequency; a Stereo Width control and PingPong facility; and each module can be deployed once in almost any order in a semi-fixed signal path allowing for smooth pads, choppy stutters, piercing combs or stupidly long repeats”), Chorrosive (BP filter, chorus and transistor emulation with the BetaBugs “one knob” control on the GUI but specific parameters accessible via host automation), Crayon Filter (the only simple mutliband resonant filter effect I can think of), FloFi (an FSU where you define a frequency range which can then be pitch shifter up or down a 5-note range, stereo widened, and mixed back in with the original signal and for which I have no way to describe…), Moneo (which can simply force a stereo track to be mono or, since it “treats each channel as a separate monaural source” the original left and right channels can be filtered resonant high or low pass and re-positioned anywhere in the panorama, all with two x/y control pads), SpinBug (”uses phase relationships and a low freq. oscillator in order to reproduce an effect produced by Leslie speakers” and admittedly a Leslie speaker emulator doesn’t sound “undefinable” but they way DSP does it you can use automation to make the swirlies into something I’ve never heard another plug-in do; and where in hell did all the Leslie emulator plug-ins go, anyways? there used to be tons of them available for no discernable reason), SVF2 (obviously this stands for “state variable filter” but the specialness of this plug-in is that “the user can morph between filter types as he sees fit, and modify the order in which each filter type morphs into the next.” and, so far as I know, there’s only 2 other plug-ins that even remotely allow you to do this, both of which have a single “cutoff” knob which, when to the left of the knobs middle detent does resonant lowpass filtering and it magically crosses over to do highpass filtering to the right of the knob… SVF goes even beyond that allowing a choice to morph between low pass, band pass, band reject, high pass, or peak filter for each channel so left and right can have two different two-filter-type morph options!), as well as a handful of other useful but more traditional VSTs. Even after this addendum I still almost forgot his KVR Developer Challenge 2006 entry, EQ22! It’s a five-band passive equalizer “with real analog sound” and internal soft limiting (so your monkeying around is less likely to clip and casue the unwanted type of distortion; internal means you don’t have to set anything it just does it automatically ) made to attenuate whatever frequencies you choose (shift-clicking the global tune control allows you to adjust them in semi-tones!), there’s a tube amp emulator (turn the knob right and you increase tube warmth, turn it left and you get “tube freeze” or increased brittleness, which is something I’ve not seen before in a harmonic overtone excitation effect), a version of the plug-in with 2x oversampling which is always nice for a mastering-type plug-in, but the surprising DSP process (sorry, I couldn’t resist) is “transient dispersal” which is a “prorpietary, dynamic, adaptive technology… when a fader is raised above the halfway mark, the proprietary ‘Transient Dispersion’ algorithm takes over the processing of the band, and will enhance the dynamic range using various latency-free adaptive techniques.” Um, obviously that doesn’t really state what in it does, but I assure it does it well. EQ22 is one of those rare mix-perfecting ingredients in the freeware VST world.

Here’s a name you might be surprised to find on this list: Jeroen Breebaart… but it seems that it’s often overlooked that his seemingly self-explanatory processors often go further than you’d think on first inspection and do things nothing else does. Ferox is described as a tape saturation modeler but it goes so far as to give you separate controls for recording level, high and low gain, saturation, hysteresis and noise effects… saturation and noise you probably know about but you can read here about magnetic tape hysteresis (”High fidelity tape recording requires a high frequency biasing signal to be applied to the tape head along with the signal to “stir” the magnetization of the tape and make sure each part of the signal has the same magnetic starting conditions for recording. This is because magnetic tapes are very sensitive to their previous magnetic history, a property called hysteresis”) and on top of that there’s both tape speed and feedback controls for emulating vintage tape echos. When automated you have one seriously slick and realistic “dub tape scrubbing” type echo effect. Omnisone is billed as an “spacial processor… with control of the side signal level, means to enhance the ambiance by making the side signal louder, and/or adding synthetic side signal, and to re-pan both input signals individually, even outside the loudspeaker base.” Did that last bit catch your attention? Automate this and you have sounds leaping beyond your stereo field. PC-2 is called a “psychoacoustic compressor… Conventional compressors are based on peak or rms-level estimation to compute their time-variant gain or attenuation [which] often causes undesirable intermodulation distortion and pumping/breathing artefacts. PC-2 instead employes a perceptual loudness model to compute the loudness of the input signal… combined with advanced attack and release stages that model peripheral adaptation of the human auditory” nerve system “The result is a very transparent compression characteristic, even with very short attack and release times” Indeed, loudness is a function of how we perceive sound, or as wikipedia puts it, “Loudness, a subjective measure, is often confused with objective measures of sound pressure such as decibels or sound intensity… Loudness is also affected by parameters other than sound pressure, including frequency and duration.” But PC-2 makes a pretty good stab at it. Timemachine is a lo-fi effect, specifically meant to emulate the “characteristic sound of vintage samplers, such as the Commodore 64, or older Akai samplers.” It does the standard bitcrushing and sample decimation effects laudably but it also gives a control for both analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog aliasing distortion and I can’t think of anything else that does that nor a lo-fi effect that so perfectly emulates crappy old sampling. SEND (Spectrum Enhancing Non-linear Device) has input and output resonant high- and lowpass combined with “non-linear elements that generate even or odd harmonics” (odd harmonics are typical of solid state distortion, even harmonics are characteristic of tube distortion and generally the kind you want for warm saturation). That’s one hell of an “excitation” processor. Lastly is Broadcast, a sort of multiband version of PC-2 and Omnisone! You get three-band psychoacoustically-relevant compression with hysteresis (to calculate, based on the rate of previous activity, how conservative to be to prevent pumping or clipping), WLIM (width limiting: if the phase correlation in one of the bands comes below zero, going out of phase, a width limiter will modify the stereo signal to ensure that the phase correlation stays within the range… which means that it manages to avoid the phase cancellation possibly caused by the 3 bands settings… basically, it prevents ‘hollow’ sounds that could result from too large side signals), the spacial processing of Omnisone including the “amb” parameter which “adds a synthetic side signal (on top of the conventional ’side’ slider that only amplifies the existing side signal). It uses a more advanced method than just side signal amplification but now in a 3-band fashion,” and finally a brick wall limiter with auto gain compensation and “density” control of hysteresis “similar to that in Barricade Pro.” Not exactly far-out effects mischief but certainly invaluable processing abilities that requires a lengthy explanation due to their orginality. I’d love to get my hands on his FSynth Pro resynthesis effect but not only can I not afford to be buying VSTs, however cheap (only €10!) but for some reason his purchasing website is down for the month of July.

Hmm, I just keep remembering more to hip ya’ll to as I go:

It hardly seems necessary to mention Jack Dark’s DarkWare VSTs, every one of which is an “FSU” and thereat none of them fit into any pre-established category.

My friend C.d.P./Pluggotic doesn’t just make amazing music and wicked synths. He’s also got shattersync (a “remix” of Jack Dark’s shattershot with a… kind of step sequencer, randomized automation… it’s completely out there, a glorius FSU effect! watching this things automation , and Necroloop (a pseudo real-time stereo slicing effect for buffer-freaks. Incoming audio gets sliced and then manipulated via 8 step-sequences controlling start/end points of the slices, pitch, one of the three effects available and randomizations… incoming audio will be divided into 8/16/32 slices, 32 patterns per sequencer with a pattern “jitter,” “chaos,” and a pattern “copy function,” buffer/slices reversal, pattern modulation rise and fall controls, variable slicing and rate resolution while tempo synced, optional quantization for loop points and pitch as well as an additional multifx mode with choice of multimode filter, multimode modulator and bitcrusher). I assure you that the astonishing audio transmogrification that these two effects will incur is like nothing else! Seriously, check out the html manual included in the download archive - this is one effect that probably has a lot deeper features than you realize. Obviously I got the idea for remixing a Darkware plug-in from C.d.P. (in my case Mistress Liquefaction from Jack Dark’s original Mister Liquid.

HGSounds has given us SoundScaper which is “designed primarily as way of creating atmospheric landscapes in the tradition of the HGSounds ethos. It has almost infinite feedback time for many modes, and so is capable of producing rich and complex drones when used with a continuous sound source. It can also be used as a traditional reverb or echo suitable for any application.” It features 300 different Timing Models, between 1 and 8 comb filters, between 0 and 4 allpass filters, 33 different “styles” of multiplication to the timing models base time to go from comb bank effects to reverb to echo banks, a master randomizer (always appreciated by moi), and a Freeze function to freeze the output, while dry signals pass through. The link above has a handy player of demo sounds of SoundScaper that autoplays examples of what it can do. It creates the chime-y drones that you’re probably imagining right now and more.

BuzzRizerLight by DocBexter won 3rd place in the 2006 KVR Developer Challenge.(in it’s “Free” as opposed to “Light” version), and deservedly so. In case you never realized that there was an update here’s the changelog: new gui; spectral compression cannot be used as EQ anymore; phase setting is automated now; lowcut setting is automated now; improved sound quality; latency is reported to host; supported samplerates now: 44, 48, 64, 88, 96kHz. It is described on the DC06 page as a “25-Band Mastering Multiband Compressor that works on the Mid/Side channels rather than L/R.” Apparently even it’s enigmatic creator cannot describe it… “one need to know that buzzrizer is _one_ big algorithm - not a series of small effects… so it is very difficult for other ppl to learn how to use it - i spent about 30% of the time making the parameters and interface look and feel familiar… so ppl (hopefully) intuitively pick the right ones… ” The controls are 12 sliders that control the “spectral compression” and work much as you’d intuit them to(?), a Dynamics section with “precision,” “keep dynamics,” “stereo width” and the more traditional controls; amp and bass level sliders, a nice graphical readout that I imagine is supposed to demonstrate input levels versus the compressor’s attenuation per band; and a limiter at the end of the signal chain above the VU meters. I love this plug-in. It can create drastic changes in your mixes, and at the mixdown stage seems to allow a multiband mid-side compression that widens the stereo image and yet allows important transients through and thus allowing your song’s dynamics to remain punchy. Don’t ask me; DocBexter can’t explain it, either.

Okay, that ends Addendum 2. I think, given that I seem a tad over-excited by DSP effects and sharing them with people, I’ll have to add the next batch I write about to a new blog post.

If you find any broken links, errors or misspellings, or have anything else to add please don’t hesitate to comment or contact me.