Device Details
Device Overview
| Name/Version: | Phase Distortion 1.0 |  |
| Author: | OspreyInstruments | |
| Description: | I was requested to make a M4L distortion, and the timing worked out well for me. This was a quick and fun effect to spin up (1h) yay! :) Phase Distortion is similar to a vibrato/chorus effect, except that rather than modulating the delay line with a traditional LFO, a copy of the input signal is fed forward through a lowpass filter to become the control signal. This is a bit of a niche effect, but should work well in some contexts! I referenced the Logic Pro and Kilohearts effects while choosing what features to include in my version. Some things to note: 1) A lower cutoff on the LPF will result in a smoother and less sporadic and glitchy delay modulation. The opposite is also true. 2) The modulation is bipolar so the Depth parameter will modulate +/- that delay amount in milliseconds. The Bias is a static number added to / subtracted from this, so the wet delay time = Depth + Bias 3) Because the modulation is bipolar, the delay would need to be biased so as to not exceed the bounds of the delay line buffer (100ms). This is especially important if the modulation was to push the delay line to a negative number... which is impossible because the delay can only access past and present values, it cannot see into the future! The delay line is clipped at 0ms and 100ms, and for the maximum symmetrical modulation depth, we would need a real bias of 50ms and a Depth 50ms. 4) This are not as they seem. The delay line always self-biases to the value of the Depth parameter. This means that if you turn the Depth up to 20ms (and the Bias parameter is set to 0ms), the delay line will self bias so that you have +/- 20ms of modulation centred about 20ms. This gives a 0ms to 40ms modulation range. 5) The Bias parameter is in addition to this self-biasing behaviour, so it can actually be used to push the the delay into clipping (at its 0ms or 100ms end points). 6) When Live mode is OFF, two things happen: a) A static delay is applied to the DRY signal path with the length of the Depth + Bias parameters. This phase sync's the dry and wet signal, aside from the ongoing modulation (basically so they are both biased to the same delay). b) The M4L devices reports this latency of the dry signal delay length (Depth + Bias parameters). Ableton should latency compensate this device relative to other tracks, but this mode is not recommended for real time performance, nor is it ideal for modulating/automating the Depth and Bias parameters. 7) When Live mode is ON, the dry signal is NOT delayed, and the device reports 0ms of latency (following the dry signal's delay). 8) The Gain parameter controls a drive into a tanh() block (soft clipping / saturation) on the sidechain / modulation signal. This follows the LPF and both compresses the modulation signal as well as clamping it to be within the -1 to 1 range. 9) The Mix control can (will) phase. If you don't like this, you may want to leave it at 100%. You should be able to "mix" using the Bias control as well, by deliberately introducing asymmetric (clipped) delays at the top or bottom end of the delay time range. Use this in conjunction with the Depth control to find something that sounds good to you. This effect is intended to mangle, and is full of happy accidents. If you are after subtlety, you will have a to work a little harder! |
Device Details
| Tags | effect |
| Live Version Used: | 10.1.18 |
| Max Version Used: | 8.1.5 |
| Date Added: | Oct 28 2023 21:07:34 |
| Date Last Updated: | Oct 28 2023 21:07:46 |
| Device Type: | audio_device |
| Download URL (report link) | https://ko-fi.com/s/d701982c24 |
| License (more info): | None |
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