By Gooooose
The HH freqshift device is a 32-band frequency shifter for manipulating and distorting sound, ranging from subtlety to craziness. Traditionally, frequency shifter will shift original material to a certain degree, but with this device, you could easily create 32 different shifted versions of the original material and mix them together, or in other words, users could now easily experiment with additive re-synthesising with the help of this device.
This device is created by Max/MSP version 8.1.1 under Ableton Live 10.1.9, it should work if you have different versions of Ableton, but the font might get messy and result may vary.
controls:
base shift freq (range +-40Khz): this is the basic shift amount, act like traditional frequency shifter.
Offset (range +-40Khz) and harmonic mult (range +-1000): these two sections decide the relationship among the 32 bands of frequency shifted degrees. For example, if the base shift freq is set to 100hz, offset set to 0hz and harmonic mult set to 1, then the 32 bands will each shift 100hz, 200hz(100*1*2), 300hz, 400hz, until 3200hz, if you now set offset to 25hz, then the end result will be original material shifted 125, 225, 325,425 hz, until 3225 hz.
CHs (range 1 to 32): sometimes, calculating 32 channels at the same time maybe too CPU-heavy and you might not need that many bands or too much high frequency contents. This part will let you decrease the number of bands to reduce CPU load.
normalize: this toggle will normalize the final mix of all bands, so even you turn all 32 bands on, the overall volume will still be reasonable. However, to get a more dynamic result, personally I would turn this one off. Because there’s rare situations that you want to turn all 32 bands full. Caution: When normalize is off, the overall volume could be very loud!
the sliders (the blue and green bars area on the right of the device) : 32 sliders is available to adjust each bands volume, essentially works as editable additive synth. Green sliders are Even shifts, Blue sliders are Odd shifts.
wetness: the dry/wet part. 0 is fully dry, 1 is fully wet.
ramp time (milisecond): this section determined how smoothly your changes will be heard. For example, if you set this section to 5000, then any direct change that you made on “base shift freq“, “offset” or “harmonic mult” will smoothly change to the value you just typed in in 5 seconds (5000 milliseconds), creating a frequency bending effect sort of like pitch bend. If you always prefer fast and direct change, turn this part to 0.
range and change of parameters: for base shift frequency and offset, the range is +- 40000hz, which is way beyond what human can heard, but could still work somehow. For example, if your recorded something at a sample rate of 88200hz (meaning you are recording material range from 0-44100hz), and shift some material down 30000 or 40000 hz, some unheard things will fall down to audible territories, sort of like an audio telescope.
To change any parameters, simply hold and drag any numbers, note that you can also click any of the number and input accurate number directly from your computer keyboard.
automation: to give user the access to accurately explore more possibilities, i didn’t use the dial style on many max for live devices. But what does this mean? For example, normal dials in Ableton will tell you now the dry/wet is 71% or the frequency of your oscillator is 100hz, but what will this track sound like if dry/wet is 71.108% with a frequency of 100.298 ? Ableton could definitely deal with floating point numbers, because it’s at least a 32bit system (recently 64bit), but the interface only allows you to dial discretely, although some of the parameters do change smoothly but looks discrete.
In short, you cannot map parameters/controls of this device from your midi controller, or to max for live LFOs. Good news is, all parameters could be found in automation lines either when you are in arrangement mode, or clip envelope section, meaning you can still draw automations of any of the controls.
Another thing worth mentioning is that, this device is “through-zero”, and that’s why lots of our ranges are from negative to positive values. Through-Zero is a concept derived from traditional FM synth, which means, if you have a 1000hz material, and you shift it down 1100hz, the result should be -100hz, but what the fuck is negative 100hz? under Through-Zero territory, the end signal will actually be 100hz - consider 0hz as a folding line. what’s interesting comes next: if your material have 1000hz, 2000hz, 3000hz, and they are all shifted down 1900hz, with through-zero support, you will get 900hz, 100hz, 1100hz, and this end result will sound drastically different from the original material, or in other words, this process essentially created new harmonic content which is important to curious producers who use all kinds of distortion, saturation or other FX to do the same thing. And remember you can adjust wetness to add just a little bit of that extra harmonic content created by you, from the original material.
