Loud = Quiet, Quiet = Loud?
Hey there,
I have a project I'm working on where I want to invert the dynamic range of an electric guitar. Make the quiet sounds (finger movements etc.) loud and the loud sounds (chords etc.) quiet.
I have a fairly clunky plan to carry this out using two streams of audio with a gate and a compressor on one (for the quiet) and a limiter on the other (to squish the loud), however a friend mentioned he'd seen a patch, possibly a M4L device, which handles this kind of problem a bit more elegantly.
Thoughts?
Thanks in advance...
That's what a compressor is for, you could load a VST one or you could use one of the omx ones, just start typing omx into an object box and you'll find them
Sorry, just rereading your post. I thought you just wanted to raise the quiet bits and lower the loud bits, but do you actually want to invert the dynamics so loud is quiet and quiet is loud?
you might be better off using a _spectral_ compression /expansion approach, so you can have different ratios and thresholds for each frequency band (ie finger sounds are mostly higher frequencies, chords rely on the grungy fundamentals in the lower freq ranges). maybe google tom erb. i think he's got a spectral compander external somewhere
T
I may be getting out of my depth here but it seems to me that you could start by subtracting the incoming amplitude from 1.0 and using that to control the output levels. BUT MIND YOUR EARS!
This would mean that 0. input level becomes an output of 1.0 so-
Silence will be turned up to 11.
It also means that the loudest parts of your composition will be hums, clicks, passing taxis and any other magnetic garbage your guitar pickups can receive. So it'll need some kind of response curve to control the quietest (loudest) bits.
richard
Turning silence up to 11 is the approach I'm going for, I want to make the effort of making the sound incongruous with what comes out. Well, moreso than is the case with an electric guitar already. I'll have a try at both approaches mentioned here, subtracting the amplitude from 1.0 seems logical although I'm not entirely sure I can make it work... It'd work with midi values but midi guitars give me the heebie jeebies, and I can't afford one.
Take a look at my EnvelopeShaper. You could try it with more extreme settings...
I did something similar by having the signal go into a led level meter and the getting the numerical data out of it. I then used a scale object to invert the number range and used those inverted number values to control gain sliders on the original signal. Probably quicker ways of doing it but it would work with a bit of tweaking and perhaps the inclusion of an F0.smooth object to stop the effect being to "jerky".
In case you're interested here's a simple version I've slapped together. I'll need to do some help file reading to get it working at frequency domain speed. Thanks for the ideas!