Melt

TL:DW; Wobbly and weird!

Melt

As useful as utility plugins are, sometimes you just have to do something wobbly and weird. Here’s Melt!

To explain what it’s doing will be a little tricky. You can just download it and play with it, but if you want to know what’s under the hood, here goes.

Suppose you have a delay buffer. You can read ‘echoes’ out of the delay buffer. If you like, you can move them around, which changes their pitch.

What if you started reading at one point, and stopped at another? You’d get a delayed ‘moving average’, a series of samples combined. It would be duller, rolled-off.

If you took that section and moved IT, then you’d have a rolled-off, darker delay tap that changed pitch.

Now, what if you took all the start points and all the end points, and made them all wobble and sway around independently, so that the shifting delay taps also changed in tone color and volume even while they pitch-shifted around?

Well, that’s Melt. It’s pretty freaky, when cranked way up. You can run a long extended delay, causing it to resemble a strange retro ambience effect, or you can tighten it right up so that you have more of a chorusy thing. It probably should always have a bunch of pitch shift depth, otherwise it’s a mite boring. You can include dry, or just crank up the wobbly weirdness: should be nice on pads and things, or anything that has to be more dark and diffuse and unpredictable.

Speaking of unpredictable, I’d be working faster but my house got run over by a car, and my Mom recently went into the hospital with a medical emergency (back out and no worse for wear, which is more than can be said for my porch). I am going to try to keep up the pace, but it’s not been a great month for Chris from Airwindows, and I am hoping things get a little more manageable. The driver’s insurance company is going to pay for the porch but I may have to sic my house-insurance company on them, and I do have to handle all the hiring of contractors and all that, personally.

Airwindows is supported by my Patreon, which is not nearly enough to deal with any of these things going on. But I am still plugging away, and hope to soon put out the video game (now with Airwindows sound!) that I was working on much of last year, along with its code, including audio code and many other useful resources. I’m hoping that, just as I make tools for mixers, I can also be of service making tools (and experiments) for game-makers, and this might help support the Patreon.