Technical information

APPENDIX 12
Below the Main section there are  ve additional sections including a pair of
high-pass and low-pass Filters, a set of Distortion controls, an EQ/Filter, a Noise
Generator and a Gate. The high-pass and low-pass  lters each have selectable
 lter slopes of 12 and 24 dB/octave and a  lter resonance (Q) control. As with
FilterBank, analog saturation can be simulated if the  lter resonant peaks are
high enough to incur signal distortion. If this is not enough distortion for you,
then the distortion available in the Distortion section should do the trick.
The Amount, Intensity, and Mode controls select the level, tone, and type of
distortion – allowing you to create anything from saturation to heavy distortion
to practically clipping! Separately, the Rectify control can reduce the negative
cycle of audio input waveforms to zero (at 50%) or can completely rectify the
input signal (at 100%). After the distortion section, there is one more band of
high-pass/EQ/low-pass  ltering for more adjustment. Often the  ltered and
distorted tones produced by the Filters and Distortion sections need some
 ne-tuning, so an extra EQ  lter is just what’s needed to remove or accentuate
the sound.
In the Noise Generator section the FutzBox noise source level is controllable,
and is passed through high-pass and low-pass  lters (12 dB/octave), enabling
the use to  lter the noise signal out of the way of incoming audio, or to create
custom noise signals. The noise level can also be reduced, or ‘ducked’, by
incoming audio. This is useful for lowering the level of background noise when
dialog or vocal is present, and then turning the same background noise back
up to previous levels once the dialog or vocal stops.
The Hyper-active Gate: Usually a gate is used to gently remove background
noise or other low-level signals. In the FutzBox gate, the attack, hold, and
release times have ranges that can make this great gate do bad things – like
simulate audio dropouts, near distortion like e ects, or when combined with
a modest output from the noise generator create interesting noise-scapes for
your background.
Analog Channel
McDSP’s Analog Channel includes two plug-ins – the AC101 and the AC202.
The AC101 ampli er gain stage simulation has input, output control, and drive
controls for the ampli er circuit, and allows you to dial in di erent types of
curve and adjust attack and release characteristics to set up di erent types of
saturation.