ElectroHat

TL;DW: Hihat tone generator (uses original sound as control voltage)

ElectroHat

I’ve always liked this one. ElectroHat uses primitive residue sequences to produce a ‘noise’ like effect that makes the hi-hat, but since it’s such a crude method of generating randomness, you get artifacts and peculiar electronic noises instead of nice pure noise. Peculiar electronic noises turn out to be a lot of fun as hi-hats!

You use this by feeding some sort of control voltage to it. It responds very, very quickly, so if there’s any amplitude modulation as part of your wave, you’ll hear it affecting the hat. You can use that on purpose, you can use a real DC control voltage to drive it, or you can simply make the envelope you want using a square wave tone for the underlying signal: it’ll rectify the squarewave to be only positive, and that’ll end up the same as a control voltage.

This work is supported by my Patreon. I’m still trying to get better and feel horrible, but I think I managed to get this VST (Linux included) done properly. If you’re using Github and managing a repository from an old system (like my dev laptop) you might find that they killed your ability to push changes, even from the command line (just a couple days ago). I worked around this by struggling weakly with it for hours and then giving up and doing my git uploading on my desktop machine. Hmph. Anyway, ElectroHat is now open source, so if you want to experiment with the method please do. Like I’ve often said, sometimes it’s good to have noise that is only moderately random, because then it comes in colors and textures.

I debugged the brighten control after making the video, so you’ll find it’s got a much more hi-hat-like sound when you try it. Hope you like it.