Nudist Audio Newsletter #13

Hey newsletterers,

We back! And what a month it’s been for me! With the Fermenter release there’s been so much to do - updating the website, fixing bugs on bugs, all those new plugin ideas that I need to get sidetracked by, etc.

I’m also working on an update to Fermenter, which includes some oft-requested features and a super-secret new button (you may have much randomness to look forward to). Coming soon to theaters near you!

I’m spending the summer at my dear brother’s music studio in Vermont, land of good cheese and anarchist bookstores and actual nudist colonies. Wish you were here!1

Ok, story time. This month I made a hilarious discovery.

I found a bug in Fermenter. Usually that’s a bad thing and, for me, means hours of banging my head on various tables. But not only does this bug not break anything - miraculously, it actually enables you to do some extra stuff, and that stuff happens to be beautiful stuff. What??

Let me explain. I wanted it to be so that every single thing in Fermenter is modulateable. But not literally everything can be modulateable: for obvious reasons, you can’t modulate the “save preset” button, or the preset bar in general, or the modulator waveform type dropdown menu.

Or so I thought.

As it turns out, uh, you actually can modulate the modulator waveform type dropdown menu. I had meant to mark those as not-modulateable, but I accidentally marked them as yes-modulateable. Oops.

Here’s an example. This sine wave is modulating its own type. So, literally, when the value of the sine wave goes up, the type increments by one, turning it into a triangle wave briefly, and then the triangle wave goes back down and it turns back into a sine wave.

It’s hard to describe how CRAZY it is that this even works.

There’s a reason I didn’t intend for this to be possible. Think about it: if the sine wave goes up and turns into a square wave, it could jump discontinuously somewhere else, and instantly turn into a different type of wave, and then jump discontinuously somewhere else…

But if you tune this right, you can actually get some really cool shapes!

I don’t know about you, but I think it is both hilarious and awesome that you can do this. So I’m going to leave it in as an Easter egg for the curious :).

To do this yourself, you’ll have to view the internal plugin parameters - it’s not visible directly in the plugin GUI.2 Every DAW has its own way of displaying these. The relevant parameters are called:

• “MOD_0/1_TYPE modulator id” - this controls which modulator is being applied to the “type” parameter.

• “mod to MOD_0/1_TYPE” - this controls how much modulation is applied.

While exploring this, I had a thought: what if you did this at audio rate? What would that sound like? No idea. But I’m going to try! I think this is representative of how I like to come up with new algorithm ideas. I’m often inspired by something in the realm of math, often something visual. Then it’s just one step of extrapolation: “how could you turn that into a sound?”

And now for your sometimes-monthly underground plugin recommendation: you should try Ewan Bristow’s Anina, which is a free plugin that takes the idea of spectral resonance suppression (like Soothe) to a creative and ridiculous extreme. Rather than the goal being to smooth out imperfections, Anina pushes the algorithm to the max to totally discombobulate input sounds. It really leans into the weird artefacts of these tools, in a way that’s very up my alley, and might be up yours too.

Here’s to your team winning the world cup this month!

Cheers,
Caleb