ununsual and non-conventional effects on synths.

[balma]

effects that are not phasers, flangers, compressors, delays, reverbs or distortions etc on hardware synths?


Can you mention and talk about some unusual effects you have found in your synth?

Yamaha EX5:

JUMP WAVE: cuts a wave a play it back in different order.

AUTO SYNTH: takes the sound, slice it, and repeats it like an analog tape delay, with a robotic repetitive sound.

Roland SP 808:

4bc (Virtual SDD 320): creates spatial breadth

[rhino]

not realy 'effects' but...
Kurzweil K2500-2600 has two strange processors:

ALL-PASS Filter: Like a phaser, but treats each harmonic by a different amount. (sounds kinda like two phasers out of sync)

SHAPER: Folds, spindles and mutilates the s**t outta any audio going thru it. Very small amounts are like distortion, more adds all sorts of non-harmonic noises, too much crushes anything into white noise.

[Solderman]

Yes there are generally alot of digital-only effects found in numerous vst/au plugins and modular software like granulators, pitch shifters set to extremes, very long glitchy time-stretches, that new modal synthesis thingy Reaktor 5.5 has, and non-linear ones like the aforementioned shaper and wrap. Comb filtering is another odd one, like allpass.

There are some unconventional vintage effects of course. The Bode frequency shifter and Marshall Time Modulator come to mind. Vocoders are pretty flexible inside their own niche too. Ringmod and Amplitude modulation are less predictable with more harmonics for the carrier signal. The Doepfer wave multiplier and distortion waveshaper are kind of unique. I'm sure there are plenty of one-of-a-kind analog effects in the modular world.

[meatballfulton]

Yamaha Motifs:

Voice Cancel (center canceller)
Low Fi (AM radio emulation)
Digital Turntable (vinyl noises)
Digital Scratch (you can guess)
Jump (autopan on LSD)
Slice (gater on LSD)
Talking Modulation (vowel effect)
Beat Change (crazed autoslicer with pitch shifting)

also that AutoSynth effect from the EX5

[CS_TBL]

I would nominate FM8fx, where you can FM-modulate the incoming signals or even apply feedback onto the input.

[balma]

Yamaha Motifs:

Voice Cancel (center canceller)
Beat Change (crazed autoslicer with pitch shifting)

The Voice cancel or center canceller is also available on the SP 808ex from Roland. This is the famous "vocal remover" or holy grail that hip hop producers want so badly and does not exist....

I have not being able to get advantage of the Beat Change. I have always seen it as a substitute for the variphrase technology, but never got satisfactory results with.

[Hugo76]

There are a couple of cool effects in the SP-606 called "Tumbling" and "Feedback Ripper". Rest of the effects are great too.

btw: the Yamaha effects listed are also present in the cs6x (and I'm guessing all of the S-synths), plus their A-series of samplers, the SU700 and the RS7000 (not all the effects are included, but as far as I can remember both the "AutoSynth" & "Jump" effects are present in all the mentioned.

[cornutt]

There's the infamous MOTM-510 WaveWarper, which takes three input signals and performs nasty analog math on them.

One thing I've played with in Csound is bit-masking and stuck-bit effects, which do some pretty strange things.

[Hugo76]

Not an effect per se, but several E-mu samplers have a function called Transform Multiply, which does a kind of morph between two samples. My experience with it is from the Emulator X software, and it's kinda cool. On the hardware samplers I hear it can take ages to process.

[MIDI_Thru_Kid]

I'm feelin' kinda lame, I got Radias filters and effects, vocoder... and a talkbox lying around that I use occasionally, more or less as a badass distortion pedal, I rarely even use the tube, lol

[blavatsky]

Virus TI has something called atomizer - takes an incoming audio signal and beat maps it, then each key you hit does a loop in time (1/4, 1/16 etc)...higher values are pitched so you can actually play a melody with the super sped up loops. Sorta like the kp3 looper effect but with more control. pitch wheel pitches the sound, mod wheel filters (lopass)

Also on virus the Vowel/Character effect - typical vowel sounds/formants are applied as a talking effect, but the quality is really good and you can automate it with LFOs/Mod matrix/arp for craziness.

SP555 - voice transform (weird vocal/formant type), DJ effect (name??) where you can use three knobs to slow down and chop current sound playing , choose a fragment to loops .
Has another effect I can't think of that automatically stutters parts of the loop like a grain shifter but you can alter how long/short it is, great lo fi stuff.

[tallowwaters]

Not an effect per se, but several E-mu samplers have a function called Transform Multiply, which does a kind of morph between two samples. My experience with it is from the Emulator X software, and it's kinda cool. On the hardware samplers I hear it can take ages to process.

Transform Multiply is essentially a vocoder, putting two waves together and keeping the harmonics in common, right?

[Hugo76]

Transform Multiply is essentially a vocoder, putting two waves together and keeping the harmonics in common, right?

If that's what constitutes a vocoder, maybe. But I would guess a vocoder should be able to process signals real time, and that is definately not the case with Transform Multiply.

[Zamise]

Yamaha's AutoSynth and Jump effect, they can do a lot, but maybe too much, they are pretty much unusable because it just wacks the sound too far out. May be good for some spacey sci-fi sound effects is about it, not much good at being musical sounding imho.

AutoSynth:


Jump:

[Hugo76]

Yamaha's AutoSynth and Jump effect, they can do a lot, but maybe too much, they are pretty much unusable because it just wacks the sound too far out. May be good for some spacey sci-fi sound effects is about it, not much good at being musical sounding imho.

The effects can yield some intersting results when you mess with the parameters. For instance, try lowering Mod Speed, Mod Depth, and AM Speed. Also try out the various Mod and AM waves. Been a while since I messed with these effects, but some really cool sounds can definately be had!