Golem
TL;DW: Blend a stereo track of two mics on an amp.
And back to earth we go, but some people will love this little utility plugin.
Golem takes in a stereo track, typically two mics on a guitar cab (a popular technique among metalheads), and mixes them to mono in the middle of the track.
But wait, there’s (very slightly) more!
Golem lets you balance the respective inputs so you hear more of L or R, and most importantly, Golem lets you apply a delay to only the side that you want to delay. The other side is always no-latency, straight through, but the one you’re delaying gets its little sample delay. Either one, it automatically switches.
Almost done…
The way this control is implemented, means that small adjustments give you a tiny, tiny linear-interpolated delay. I think linear interpolating is best for guitars because it’ll scrub off the tiniest amount of ‘hiss and rattiness’ while giving the least processed sound. That said, interpolating between samples in the way this does, allows you to dial in the subtlest imaginable phase relationships between your mics, and THAT has profound effects on the subtleties of your miked guitar tone. You are tuning where the cancellations between mics are, on a very fine level, in order to do specific things in the sound, and you need easily controllable subsample delays at your fingertips. Enter Golem, your simple tool for exactly that.
And THAT is the point, and also why this plugin has some cool marquee fans who swear by it. (Slippy, can I repost the ‘All Things Slippery’ mp3? I think there are lots of people who need to hear it, and it was a really soulful time in your life. I hoard it, since it fell off the Internet. But I digress)
There are some options for allowing a larger range of delay, or inverting one of the channels, but it’s basically just mixing two tracks and being able to micro-delay one of them. Some folks will be deeply unimpressed because you have to be a bit of a fanatic to get that worked up about delaying one of the guitar cab mics five-eighths of a sample in order to place a cancellation node JUST EXACTLY where you need it to be.
But you’re talking to someone who noise shapes a long double to the floating-point buss, so yay fanatics! You know who you are. This plugin is for you.
The Patreon is on the verge of another goal: if it is over $1000 when June begins, firstly that’s a cool birthday present (June 5!) and secondly it means you’ll get Righteous4 (with the new Spiral distortion algorithm) AND Energy in June, because >$1000 means I release two from the list each month from then on. There should still be time to include the new work I do, but the backlog goes twice as fast. Now, it probably won’t stay over $1000 because Patreon always has people drop off when billing starts, and that’s okay. I’m just saying, that goal is coming this month or next, and that means you start to get the ‘list’ released faster. And Righteous4 is next, regardless. (It should be possible when the list is all done, to go and start putting out specific legacy versions, including ones with legacy sound-code: sometimes people want things like the old bizarre antialiasing routines I was doing around 2007)
I think really the best birthday present is all of you. Thank you <3
Thank You Sir Chris.
Startlingly useful!
Sort of by the way… BassDrive still available? Would You consider making BassDriveDemo?
Many thanks.
M.
Pretty useful with isolating parts of old breaks, like the reverberated noise burst layered with the snare in the disco mix of Orange Krush’s Action. Wish it had other options for interpolation, I think it might be adding in some new noise? Just wish it had a few more small options like allpass and gain, but not the sort of phase adjustment in PhaseNudge because I find that sounds more like a boxy comb filter to the point where I’m beginning to question if it’s actually working right on my computer when compared to Christian-W. Budde’s bare-bones Phase Rotator since it and other allpass filters have a smooth curve to the phase adjustment and PhaseNudge looks like smooth stair steps, which mirrors the echo-like sound it creates vs a laser zap. That’s probably more useful for guitar cabs than what I try it with though.
Even if it never changes beyond the current version it’s still very useful, especially with Variety of Sound’s preFIX or FL’s Stereo Shaper before it to adjust the phase of a channel and get even more tones out of recordings. It’s like I can pull things out, make adjustments, and stack them back together. Just not really put them back together exactly, unless perhaps I capture an impulse response of the allpass filters so I can reverse the smearing after subtracting one of the original channels? Or it’ll just make things smearier, it’s something for me to play with.
I love playing with your plugins, there’s so many neat things to do.
+ Jacob I loved that! How would you route/chain for that? This phase shaping technique sounds interesting!
My experiment:
send#1 – conv reverb (eq before, sidepass after)
send#2 – golem
aux bus – capacitor (cutting some highs and some lows)
master – console5; fromtape; maybe a passive hi-lo
result: there are some concellations; an interesting behaviour in highs, lows, width (synth pads) and depth (drums, percussion).
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