Infinity
TL;DW: Infinity is a MatrixVerb specifically designed to sustain and layer sounds forever.
Here’s a follow-up to what I’ve been doing with Householder reverbs, and my recent plugins MatrixVerb (for flexibility) and Reverb (optimized for size variation only). The algorithm I’m using has one more specialty: infinity! The way it works, if you do nothing else except feed it back on itself, it will sustain infinitely: that’s its basic, natural state.
And so I did. :)
Of course that’s too simple: there’s a filter (not in the feedback path) that will let you sweep its frequencies in and out, from deep space to bright and unnatural textures. There’s a size control that will let you resize the space from gong-like tones to the depths of galaxies… and a damping control that does NOT make the reverberations die away. Instead, it just applies a subtle darkening, useful if you’re looking for darker spaces.
More importantly, Infinity is tailored to handle anything from subtle noises to the full blast of a mix: if you saturate it and keep adding sound, what’ll happen is that it’ll begin to squeeze out earlier infinity to make room for what’s coming in. That way, the maximum level will stay under control, but it’ll also tend to emphasize the most recent thing you did (as long as it’s loud). If you’re not adding loud things, you’ll continue to build up the texture as you go.
It’s also a dual mono effect. What that means is, you’re adding things to infinitely sustain at distinct places in the stereo image. What’s on the left stays on the left, likewise with the right, centered stuff will stay centered. This is different from both MatrixVerb and Reverb, both of which will ‘spread’ centered information as the reverb continues. Infinity doesn’t have the stereo pitch shifting that would cause that to happen, because it’s entirely dedicated to providing pads and spaces that can literally sustain forever without change. So, it can also sustain a sound-space across the stereo field that doesn’t change the stereo mix, either. You can keep things mostly panned to the center, or put in super-wide stuff that’s fully L or R, or both.
My hope is that this is an inspiring tool for those who like making ambient spaces. You can combine it with MatrixVerb to have a distinct, unvarying source of infinite sound which is then broadened and made richer by the added options of MatrixVerb in a way you couldn’t do from MatrixVerb alone. Or, you can just use it as its own little instrument. Hope you like it!
I get paid to make these things full-time, every week, through being on Patreon. If you like that being part of your life, and sometimes you get a nice free plugin from me, you can join the Patreon provided you can afford to do it: otherwise, please let me give you plugins while you get into more of a position to give back. For now, things look good and I expect to even start my ‘DIY synth parts’ project before long. Then I’ll be able to give back in an even more exciting way than just making plugins every week. (but I’ll keep doing that as long as there are plugins to be made!)
Could really use a means, or indeed multiple means, of manually biasing the history to silence. Something to think about for Infinity II (which should happen for the name alone, really).
Agreed. Any kind of control in the feedback path would be cool.
Love this… I’ve ‘wasted’ many hours in a trance-like state with it! Agree, it could do with some means of ‘flushing’ the buffer.