Hi all…Having a few adventures into synths and a more ambient style of music. Been listening to a lot recently (mostly internet radio) and love hearing these long, sweeping envelopes that can seem to go on forever. I know these can be setup in synths, like helm and surge xt, both of which I use, but I am hearing a lot of these effects applied to analogue sounds, vocals, guitars etc…
I have tried to do this in Ardour (8.10) but my efforts just dont seem to hit the mark… Mostly, I am trying to do this with automation applied to parametric eq’s, coupled with reverb and echo automation, but they really dont sound anywhere near as good as I am hearing on ambient radio…
Since the whole calf gui plugin thingy, I have been trying other plugins and am probably facing a bit of a steep learning curve again, so am wondering if anyone has any pointers for me, in particular plugin and automation setups to apply to analogue sounds? I am a big fan of gui’s but will try anything, with anything if I can get these sweeping envelopes to sound good…
I will give it a go…! Currently piddling around with multiple automation lanes, each adjusting a single bandwidth from a multiband parametric eq, keep telling myself I will get better the more time I put into it, but feel like I am tangling myself up this way… and its quite time consuming…!
Had hoped their was a straightforward technique to play with here, especially as I am trying to stay away from calf plugins and embrace all these new (to me) ones…
Will let you know how I get on…
No good Tony, at least I could not get it to do a long sweep… Still feels like it ought to be acheived with an automated low/high pass filter, perhaps I just need to find the right plugin, sooo many to choose from… Will keep trying…
Why not try ACE High/Low pass filter bundled with ardour.
Simply use the low pass function and automate the cut off frequency
In the screen shot i just drew a couple of points with the draw tool
Thank you merry10…! Definately more of a sweep with those settings, using 36db with high resonance works nicely…! Still not quite there as there seems to be a sweet spot in the sweep and either side of it fades rapidly, will have a play around and see if I can get it right…
Think I just figured the problem with doing that, works very well with single tone sounds, eg a guitar note, but when applied to drums, or a full guitar chord, the filter seems to only hold the frequency below the cutoff and loses all above it… Will play further and see what I can get it to do as your suggested method certainly gets me closer than I have been, my objective is shape the sound rather than cutoff too much of it…
Its a low pass filter so cuts off frequencies above the cut off. if you set the steepness down to 12dB per octave it will let more higher frequencies through. 36dB per octave is a very sharp cut off. Say the cut off frequency was 1KHz, then 2KHz (octave above) will be 36dB quieter, a drastic amount.
Got it…! Cant say its the answer to everything as there are so many layers of possiblilties with this, but it does feel like I now have a set of toys I can play with to get my desired effect, and I am sure there are many different ways of doing it…
Using LSP x16 parametric plugin, I automated filter 0 frequency in hi-pass mode to cut the lows, then also automated filter 7 as a low shelf to enhance the highs, at the same time also automated filter 7 gain which meant the volume did not disappear when going up the curve… Was able to get all sorts of sweeps up and down the frequency range without losing any of the more complex dynamics… Going to have a lot of fun playing with this!!
Been able to play with this a little more now, love these LSP plugins, been hard to work them out sometimes but they are very powerful and once you get your head around them… well, dont miss calf anymore…!
Discovered that using the 16x (or even x32) parametric gives me a tool that can work with any sound, analogue or midi, to create these sweeps. Just a matter of working out which bands work best with which sounds. Going have to restrain myself from sweeping everything now, such fun to play with… Even using this method to push certain instruments into the background for a few bars to bring a solo to the front is quite irresitable… fun…!
