Plugin suggestions? Technical questions

I am looking for some plugins that will work with OS X (10.6). I don’t know how to find what I’m looking for because I don’t know the names for some of them.

  1. I’m looking for something like a gate or compressor (but I think it might be called something else, or I just don’t know how to use a compressor). One example of how I want to use it is to get the sound of a snare, but have the attack (or release?) set so that much of the initial “pop” of the snare does not get passed along. I want it to NOT catch transients - in other words - but pass most of the sound after a transient along. Does someone know how this is done?

  2. Does anyone know of a good vocoder that I could get working on OS X? I’m going to try VoCodeX, but if someone’s got experience do tell!

  3. Another one I don’t know the precise name of, nor do I know exactly how it would be implemented with Ardour/Jack. I’m looking for an envelope follower type of plugin that can pull an envelope wave form from a signal, and then I want to control parameters in Ardour or other plugins with that. Is this possible in A2? A3 with MIDI?

In response to 1, what you are really looking for is called transient modification. Can’t make any suggestions off hand for you though sorry. You can replicate it with a somewhat complex series of sidechains and compressors with gates, but honestly you would be better off searching for the actual thing.

In response to number 2, I haven’t ever really looked for ‘good’ vocoders to be honest, though I have used the TAL vocoder a bit recently for various things with success.

Number 3 you might have to explain a bit differently, not sure I am understanding what you are asking as it sounds like you are trying to use it as a sidechain for plugins that don’t have sidechains, which is of questionable usefulness compared to just using plugins with sidechains to start with.

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Thanks for the info. As for 3, an example would be if I wanted to replicate something like a qtron envelope filter. It’s kind of like wah, but sweeps the filter according to voltage (envelope). So, if I could have a filter plugin set to modulate the frequency according to the envelope of the signal of my choosing (via sidechains?), that would give me what I’m looking for

I don’t really know what a sidechain is.

Well I don’t know of a specific plugin that does w hat you are looking for no, but then I don’t deal to much with wahs either. However it sounds like what you are doing would likely best be accomplished using a programming environment like Pure Data or possibly Ingen(Which I have no experience with and don’t believe it runs on OS X) is my suspicion.

You can do (1) with a compressor, you just need a super fast attack to squash the transient and a reasonably quick release to bring the body of the sound back in almost immediately after the initial transient drops below the threshold. An 1176 can do this in real life and about a million people have tried with varying degree’s of success to emulate that compressor. Maybe look for something like that.

(3) I would do in Csound or Pure Data. Or C++. What you are trying to do is extract a control signal from analysis of an audio signal. You might be able to make that happen using off the shelf plugins in Ardour but most likely at the cost of your sanity.

Any reasonably comprehensive, real deal modular synthesis environment should allow you to do something like that. Nothing like that will be especially trivial to learn.

Yes but a compressor won’t really ever be completely that, it can be close as you suspect, but if the body of the sound is still a reasonably strong sound compared to the transient, it will still be a problem and a compressor won’t be able to cope very well. That is why I suggested emulating it exactly would be a lot of headache and using an actual transient modifier would be better(Really it primarily allows you to just draw an envelope on the sound)

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