elenzil_modulator

Elenzil Amplitude Modulator

Use this machine wherever you'd have used Goenik's Amplitude Modulator.
They serve the same purpose, but this one has a cleaner signal than Goenik's.

General
This effect oscillates the input between the left and right output. This can be used either to pan the sound left and right, or to alternate the sound between two different effects-paths. For example you can have your vocals alternate slowly between having a lot of reverb and a little, and/or move slowly (or quickly) between the left and right speakers.

Parameters |
Speed | - This is a generic value for the speed of the oscillation, and depends on the Speed Unit for interpretation.

Speed Unit

- This controls the meaning of Speed.
00 = milliHertz. Speed 2000 = 2 Cycles Per Second. Good for fast oscillations.
01 = milliSeconds. Speed 2000 = 2 Seconds Per Cycle. Good for slow oscillations.
02 = tick. Speed 16 = 16 Ticks Per Cycle. Good for slow oscillations that match your beat.
03 = 256ths of a tick. Speed 512 = 2 Ticks Per Cycle. Good for fast oscilltions that match your beat.

Wave | -The shape of the oscillation. Sine, Square, Triangle, Saw, Inverse Saw. Note - in Version 1.0, i'm not using lookup tables, so Sin is more expensive to use than the others. Use triangle if you're concerned about CPU usage.
Wave Power | - The oscillation value (0 - 1) gets raised to this power. This tends to eliminate mid-range values and concentrate the action on either full left pan or full right pan. I find a power of 2 or 3 accentuates the panning effect, and values higher than that get sort of weird.
Floor | - The minimum of either output channel. Floor 1.0 = no modulation, floor 0.0 = full modulation
Phase | - The phase difference between output channels. 0.0 = none, the channels modulate in sync. (mono) 1.0/-1.0 = the channels are offset by +/- half a full cycle.
Slur | - This softens the output. Good to leave up around 0.96. Without slur, when you change the phase or floor or wavetype, you'll probably get some clicks and pops.
Gain | - I use this effect so often that i threw in a gain to simplify my machine layouts.
Reset | - (track param) This starts the oscillator wave over again at zero. This is useful if you're using the Tick based timing, and want the panning to be at a particular place at a particular time.

Notes
Goenik's amplitude modulator was by far my most frequently used effect. I was addicted to the slowly changing atmospheric effects which it made possible. A song just didn't sound right unless each piece was panning at least a little bit from speaker to speaker. But, after spending hours in cooledit cleaning up the small artifacts introduced by the AM, i realized my love was not perfect. Hence the Elenzil amplitude modulator, which does not introduce those small fuzzy noises of the geonik.

Since i built this machine for my own use, and i have a fast computer, i haven't given much attention to optimization. I'm actually calling sin() once per sample! Please feel free to imrove this with the lookup tables. Each instance of the machine uses about 1% of the cpu on my 1GHz thunderbird. If the source code wasn't distributed with this machine, it should be available at http://www.elenzil.com/progs/buzz. Or email me.

Okay.

Orion Elenzil
20010303
santa cruz california