Audio Effects
A delay line and the echo it makes, that line swept by an oscillator into chorus and flanger, combs and all-passes stacked into a room, three biquads that bend a spectrum, a curve that clips a wave into harmonics, and a follower that turns a loud passage down.
Digital Sound & Music
Before you start
Some lessons here build on lessons from other arcs: Sound as Numbers: Sampling, Oscillators: Sine, Square, Saw, Triangle, Subtractive Synthesis: The Low-Pass Filter, Additive Synthesis: Building Timbre from Sines, ADSR Envelopes.
- 1
Delay Lines and Echoin review
Sound · Effects · ~25 minPush a pluck through a ring buffer one delay long, watch the slot pointer read the echo and write it back with feedback, and hear why every repeat is the last one scaled.
- 2
Chorus and Flanger: Modulated Delaysin review
Sound · Effects · ~25 minSweep a delay line's read head with a slow oscillator, read between two slots, and hear one voice become a chorus, or a flanger whose comb of notches moves across the spectrum.
- 3
Reverb: Comb and All-Pass Networksin review
Sound · Effects · ~30 minSend one click through four feedback combs and two all-passes sample by sample, watch a room's tail build and decay, and hear a clap in a space you can resize.
- 4
Parametric EQ: Peaking and Shelving Biquadsin review
Sound · Effects · ~30 minPush a saw through a low shelf, a peak, and a high shelf in series, read the cookbook numbers behind each band, and hear a few decibels of boost and cut on a 110 Hz saw.
- 5
Distortion and Waveshapingin review
Sound · Effects · ~25 minPush a sine into a transfer curve sample by sample, watch its crests squash into new harmonics, and hear why a symmetric curve adds only odd ones and a bias lets the even ones in.
- 6
Dynamic Range Compressionin review
Sound · Effects · ~30 minFollow a level detector with two speeds, turn the excess over a threshold down by a ratio, and watch a loud passage come down sample by sample while a quiet one passes untouched.