Effects Explained
By Scott Lehman
Recovered from archive.org
This is a series of original articles that explains how effects work, what the common effects parameters do, some of the implementation issues, and also include sound examples to demonstrate how those parameters alter the sound. There are no standards though, so different manufacturers may use different parameter names, plus generally add other components to create a more unique sound to distinguish their products.
This is pretty experimental - please let me know if there are any problems or things that could be better, what's useful, what isn't, if the sounds should be bigger/smaller, or whatever else comes to mind. You can make requests as to what topics you want to see covered, and I'll see what I can do. I plan to stick with the basic and essential effects first.
Several different sound formats are used in these articles. We recommend using the MPEG files which are very high quality and not very large. You can get sound players and test them out via How to use IUMA page.
- Expansion/Noise Gating
- Equalization
- Compression/Limiting
- Phase Shifting (Phasing)
- Ring Modulation
- Chorus
- Delay
- Reverberation
- Flanging
Other Articles
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A somewhat technical discussion about tubes and why they are so sought after. From the IEEE Spectrum.
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Hutch's Hints, Tips, and Tricks: Compressors & Limiters
Some tips for using compressors and limiters.
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(195K)
A PDF file that takes a pretty technical look different methods of computing coefficients in parametic EQs. If you want to jump right to some equations to implement an equalizer, try the
.
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for use with Mathematica. It covers some theory and design.
Tech Notes:
TC Electronic and Alesis have published several tech notes on compression as well, which have some different material from the above article. These were originally found on their respective web sites, and are in PDF format.
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(14K)
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(92K)
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(7K)
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(136K)
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(145K)
by Howard Massey for TC Electronic.