Hothouse beats

Equalizers are great. They let you cut or boost the frequencies of your signal to shape the audio like you want it. A little more bass maybe? A tad more definition in the highs? Brilliant! But sometimes there might not be enough there to begin with, or sometimes cutting the stuff you don’t want might leave what’s left a bit bland. Maybe the kick is just weak in the first place?

So what we want to do then is not really to boost it, but add to it. One way of fixing it could be to create extra tracks, putting another kick parallel to your original one. That might do the trick but it will be kind of fiddly work perhaps, depending on your original beat. A better way, we think, is to use an envelope follower. ”What’s that?” some of you might ask. Envelope followers are not uncommon in the modular world for instance, and what they’re used for primarily is to have audio trigger and shape envelopes. Like using a drum loop to shape a separate sound source or modulation event, like a synth voice or a filter cutoff. Usually they trigger when audio is above a certain level for instance, and decay as the signal strength drops. So you could also use it to, say, trigger drums by strumming a guitar or saying ”Now!” (or whatever) into a mic. Fun versatile stuff, but how does any of this apply to Fosfat?

First of all, Fosfat is not a dedicated envelope follower in itself, but by adopting this idea of having audio trigger an event, we have a way to add sound to an existing signal, perfectly mirroring it without any ”extra” work. By adding precise controls for trigger center frequency and width we can choose exactly what part of our signal we want to add to, be it kick, snare, hi-hat or whatever else you have.

In Fosfat we can add ”fatness” via the onboard sine wave oscillator and fizz or sharpness via the noise processor. And we can add multiple instances of the plug-in to add several oscillators and noise processors to the final output.

One thing that can happen when adding tone in the form of a sine wave is that the kick for instance becomes too tonal. That it ”sings” essentially. Sometimes that sounds really cool and might be exactly what you want, but we also added a Pitch Drop control for the times you want to keep your kick snappy, but still strong. The Pitch Drop follows the decay of the envelope, letting us decide how much tonal quality we want our added sound to have.

All in all, in our view Fosfat is a properly useful plug-in that can really help you grow those nutrient deficient percussive sounds to new heights. But in the vein of taking inspiration from things like envelope followers, we think it lends itself in interesting ways to rather experimental uses as well, like playing with Pitch Drop automation or putting a responsive noise on vocals ...

The possibilities are really quite plentiful.