Effects & Master

Everything in this chapter happens after the voice. The oscillators, filter and coloration stages hand over one finished stereo signal; the six effects and the master section decide where that signal appears to live — how it repeats, how much space surrounds it, how wide it spreads, and how it leaves the plug-in. Phaseburn One is monophonic by design, and the effects spend the budget that buys: each one runs real per-sample processing on the same 64-bit signal path as the voice itself.

Every effect listens where you point it

Most synths run their effects as a fixed chain: whatever leaves the filter passes through everything, in one factory-set order. Phaseburn One ships with a chain too — but nothing about it is fixed. Each effect is a module whose inputs are cables you patch, and the first thing to learn about the effects is that what goes in is a decision you make per effect.

An effect can listen to the mix bus — the summed oscillators before the filter — or to the filter’s output, or tap one oscillator directly: the Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) voice, the VECTOR phase-shaping oscillator, the MORPH oscillator, or the sub. That idea unlocks arrangements a fixed chain cannot express: echo only the MORPH line while the PLL bass stays bone dry; send only the VECTOR into a long reverb so the sustain blooms while the attack stays close; crush one oscillator and leave the rest clean. Out of the box everything is already patched: the default chain runs mix bus → filter → BitCrusher → distortion → chorus → delay → reverb → freezer → master, every cable at unity — and every effect powered off. A powered-off effect passes signal straight through, so the chain stays transparent until you press a module’s power button. Effects come alive with power, not with patching.

The reverse mistake — a module powered on whose cables have been unpatched — would otherwise fail silently: the effect runs, but no signal reaches it, so the sound never changes. The instrument flags it instead. A power button on the FX tab turns yellow and reads PATCH while its module is on but not fully wired, and switching such a module on opens a small prompt with a way out: Connect wires the module into the playing chain in one click — the button names the exact patch it will make, FILTER → BITCRUSHER → COMP for example, and re-routes the cable it interrupts so the dry shortcut does not dilute the effect; Open Patchbay jumps to the Mixer tab with the module’s box pulsing so it is easy to find; Not now dismisses the prompt. The yellow state clears the moment both jacks carry cables.

Two more conventions are shared by every effect. First, each input is a cable with its own level — off, unity, or pushed a few decibels hot — so a send can be a whisper or a shove. Second, every effect has a MIX control. For the delay and the chorus, MIX adds wet signal on top of the effect’s own input, which always passes at full level; for the reverb, distortion and BitCrusher, MIX crossfades between the effect’s input and the processed signal. The distortion pairs MIX with a LEVEL knob — a true output level on the processed signal, independent of the blend. Cable levels set what an effect hears; MIX sets what it contributes; and the cable each effect sends toward the master sets how loud that contribution lands in the sum.

The chain is the front door to a larger routing system: a patchbay on the Mixer tab, where effects can feed each other in any non-circular order or run in parallel. The delay, chorus and reverb also expose feedback tap and return jacks there, and each of those three loops accepts an insert — the distortion, the BitCrusher, the freezer, another time effect, even the filter. This chapter describes each effect as a unit; the patchbay chapter (Chapter 5 — Mixer & Patchbay) covers the cables between them. The effect panels themselves — knobs and power buttons, no routing — live on the FX tab.

Delay: repeats that slide in pitch

Set an eighth-note delay, then raise FREQ SHIFT a few hertz and hold a note. The repeats stop being copies: each one comes back slightly higher than the last, sliding up through the harmonics of your patch and then out of them entirely. The defining feature of this delay is a frequency shifter inside the feedback loop.

Frequency shifting is not pitch shifting. A pitch shifter multiplies every frequency by a ratio, so harmonics stay in tune with each other. A frequency shifter adds a fixed number of hertz to every partial — a tone with partials at 100, 200 and 300 Hz, shifted up by 50 Hz, reappears at 150, 250 and 350 Hz. The harmonic series is broken, and that is the appeal: the technique goes back to Harald Bode’s analog frequency shifters, and its inharmonic sheen is a sound no filter or chorus can make. Because the shifter sits inside the loop, the shift compounds — each repeat is shifted again, so tails spiral steadily upward or downward like a barber pole, seemingly without end.

Three controls define the shift. SHIFT sets the amount per pass: with WIDE off it spans a fine window, and WIDE opens the full range for extreme mangling (see table). A few hertz gives slowly rotating, phasing tails; tens of hertz turns repeats into metallic bells; hundreds shreds them into clangs. SIDEBAND chooses which sideband survives: at the USB end repeats shift up, at the LSB end they shift down, and the midpoint keeps both sidebands for a ring-modulated echo character.

SHIFT carries the S snap badge. Lit, the knob stops being a hertz control and becomes a semitone one: twenty-five stops from an octave down to an octave up, with the readout and the tick ring naming notes instead of hertz — C4 is no shift at all. Three things are worth knowing before you trust the note names. Only the fundamental lands on the named note: this is a true frequency shifter, so tuning the shift to a fifth puts the fundamental a fifth up and leaves every harmonic somewhere inharmonic — the note name is a tuning reference for the root, not a transposition. The reference is middle C, because a linear shift has no intervals of its own and one had to be chosen. And the grid stops at one octave in each direction, because shifting down the fundamental reaches DC an octave and a bit below and there is no pitch left to name; the full sweep is one click away with the badge off. WIDE hides while the badge is lit, since the note grid brings its own span. Engaging the snap never moves a shift you have already set, and a value that is not on a semitone still reads out in hertz, so the readout can never name a note the delay is not actually at.

The rest of the panel shapes the trail. FEEDBACK sets how long repeats regenerate — and past 100 the line tips into self-oscillation, blooming into a steady drone instead of running away, because the loop’s own saturation bounds every pass. SMEAR diffuses each repeat’s transients through an allpass network, from crisp echoes to a reverb-like wash that thickens with every pass. TUBE adds saturation inside the loop, so each repeat returns a little more worn than the one before, and FB LPF / FB HPF darken or thin the trail as it recirculates. The SYNC switch in the module header decides how time is set: off — the default — the panel shows a TIME knob in milliseconds; on, it swaps that knob for a beat division, from four bars down to 1/128 including dotted and triplet values, with the longest divisions capped at the delay’s maximum time (see table). DUAL appears only while SYNC is on, because what it selects is a second division for the right channel — asymmetric bounces on the grid. Free-running, the right tap is the left one plus OFFSET, which pushes it up to 40 ms behind for width. PONG makes repeats alternate left-right.

Reverb: rooms you can resize mid-note

The reverb is built in two stages, and both are audible as separate handles. Early reflections — the first fraction of a second of a room answering back — come from banks of discrete stereo taps, and their level is exposed as its own control, which behaves like proximity: high, and the room’s first slap is present and close; low, and only the diffuse wash remains. The taps feed an eight-line feedback delay network (FDN) — the late-reverb architecture in the Jot / Stautner–Puckette lineage — which recirculates the sound into a dense tail.

SIZE scales the whole structure. The lower range covers rooms that could exist; past the middle it keeps going, into halls and then into spaces with no architectural excuse. DECAY sets how long the tail rings, from under a second to around a minute, spaced so the musical middle of the range is easy to hit. DIFFUSION controls how quickly reflections blur into a smooth wash — low values keep the grain of individual echoes, high values are instantly dense.

Decay shaping is where this reverb rewards attention. DECAY HF is a relative control: it sets how fast the highs die compared to the rest of the tail. Below one, the tail darkens as it fades, the way air absorbs treble in a real hall; above one, the top end outlives the body. The tank’s LPF and HPF are damping filters inside the recirculation itself, draining highs or lows a little more on every pass; together with DECAY HF they sculpt where the tail’s energy sits without changing its overall length. MOD speed and depth add slow chorus-like movement inside the tank, which keeps very long tails from settling into a static ring. Saturation warms the recirculating signal with soft clipping, and pre-delay inserts a gap — free or synced to tempo — between the dry note and the room’s answer, keeping attacks articulate under heavy wet mixes.

Wet gain, and the WET/MIX decision

The Reverb header carries a MIX / WET switch. MIX is the normal insert behaviour: the Dry/Wet knob blends the room against the signal feeding it. WET removes the dry path entirely and outputs only the tail, which is what you want when the reverb is fed from a send, or when you are layering a room under a part that already exists elsewhere in the chain.

Wet Gain trims that wet path across ±24 dB — in WET mode it is the only level control the return has, so cutting an over-hot room matters as much as boosting a distant one. It sits after the tank’s own safety limiter, so it behaves as a real output gain rather than as something the limiter quietly eats — useful when a distant, heavily damped room needs to come forward without touching Decay or Size. It is a modulation destination, so an envelope or LFO on Wet Gain swells or ducks the room without disturbing the tail’s character; see the modulation chapter (Chapter 4 — Modulation) for routing.

Shimmering tails come from two effects cooperating rather than a dedicated knob. The delay already feeds the reverb in the default chain: power both on, put a few hertz of upward shift on the delay, and every repeat entering the room arrives a little higher than the last, smeared by the tank into a slowly climbing, shimmering tail.

DUCKING solves the classic problem of a long reverb swallowing the part that feeds it. An envelope follower tracks your playing and pushes the reverb down while notes sound; the tail swells back in the gaps, with a recovery time set by a tempo division — an easy way to keep a big room from crowding a lead line.

Chorus: thickness as a choice

One line frames this whole module: Phaseburn One’s voice is already stereo at the source, so the chorus is a color you reach for, not a structural repair for a mono engine. It is a four-mode engine — the header picker chooses CHORUS, FLANGER, ENSEMBLE or VIBE, and the knobs remap to each mode’s own vocabulary (in FLANGER, DELAY becomes CENTER, DEPTH becomes SWEEP in octaves, DETUNE becomes STAGGER and FEEDBACK becomes RESO). Beside the picker sit a STEREO / MID-SIDE switch, a THRU-0 toggle that lets the sweep pass through true zero delay for tape-style flanging, and SYNC, which locks the LFO to the host tempo.

The engine is a bank of chorus voices, each a stereo pair of short delay lines whose time is swept by the chorus’s own LFO. The swept delay bends pitch slightly, and mixing bent copies against the dry signal produces the familiar ensemble thickening. VOICES sets how many copies run at once. SPREAD distributes the LFO phase across them so they swirl out of step instead of pumping in unison; DETUNE, marked in cents, holds each voice’s delay a fixed step apart from its neighbors — not a sustained pitch offset but a static decorrelation of the copies, a layer of thickening underneath the motion — and PAN fans the voices across the stereo field.

The LFO has its own rate, depth and shape — sine, triangle, random walk, or the two ramp shapes that give the barber-pole modes their endless rise and fall — plus a stereo phase offset that sweeps the left and right channels apart for movement between the ears. In CHORUS mode the base DELAY sets the register of the whole effect — shorter settings comb brighter, the longest drift toward doubling; for true flanging, switch to FLANGER mode, where CENTER parks the sweep and RESO feeds the comb back on itself. ENSEMBLE runs the classic multi-LFO string-machine shimmer, and VIBE bends pitch without a dry blend for throaty, rotary-adjacent movement.

FEEDBACK is bipolar — negative values invert the comb pattern for a hollower resonance — and CROSS FB feeds the loop across channels for spatial swirl. The loop carries its own low-pass filter and saturation, so high feedback turns resonant and dark rather than brittle. On the output side, wet-only high- and low-cut filters confine the effect to a band — the classic move is cutting the wet lows so the bass stays solid while everything above it moves — and a wet-only width control scales the result from mono to extra wide.

Distortion: four archetypes, one cascade

The distortion is not a single curve with a drive knob in front of it. It is three cascaded soft stages with filters between them feeding a final clipper whose knee tightens as you push — the same arrangement a guitar amplifier uses, and for the same reason. Each stage adds a little harmonic content that the next filter shapes before the following stage multiplies it again, so the buildup is gradual and follows what you play, rather than arriving all at once as a wall of buzz.

The four modes in the section header are voicings of that one cascade, not four separate effects. OD is a mild singing overdrive that leaves some dynamics intact — the flattering choice for a resonant filter sweep, where it folds the resonance back into the body of the tone instead of leaving it whistling on top. DIST is the classic: harder, flatter, the picture squaring off. FUZZ is deliberately broken — heavily asymmetric, and its bias drifts with the envelope, so notes sputter and gate as they die away instead of fading politely. METAL is tight and scooped, with a highpass between the stages so the low end cannot smear the ones above it, and the widest gain range of the four. Because the modes differ only in their settings, switching between them glides rather than cutting.

DRIVE reads in decibels, and its ceiling follows the archetype: +30 dB in OD, +42 in DIST, +48 in FUZZ, +60 in METAL. That is a great deal of gain, and the important part is what it does not do — every stage is calibrated so that a signal at the synth’s nominal level leaves it at the nominal level, and AUTO adds a measured make-up curve on top. Turning DRIVE up changes what the sound is, not how loud it is. Wind it to the top and a thirty-decibel swing of input level comes out within about a decibel: the dynamics have been converted into harmonics, which is exactly the flat, relentless picture that hard electronic music is after.

BITE is the control that keeps that from becoming a smear, and it is not a tone boost. It lifts a mid band going into the cascade and puts it back on the way out, so what changes is how hard that band is driven rather than how loud it ends up — five to six times the harmonic content around its centre, at any playing level, while the balance moves only a few decibels. The depth follows the envelope, so a loud note is driven harder than a quiet one: level contrast collapses as you drive, but accent contrast survives, converted into edge and grit. Turn it up on a sequenced line with accents and the line starts speaking rather than buzzing.

LOW decides what happens to the bottom. Left of centre it is a tightening highpass into the drive (from 20 Hz up to around 300), so bass stops eating the headroom the mids need — the control behind a tight, articulate chug. Right of centre it does the opposite: it splits a clean sub band out, routes it around the distortion and sums it back afterwards, so the weight underneath stays intact while everything above it is destroyed. Centre passes everything straight through.

BIAS sets the symmetry. Centred, the curve is symmetric and you get odd harmonics; either way off centre it skews, bringing in the even harmonics that read as thickness and warmth. Pushed far in FUZZ it drives the gated, sputtering behaviour that mode is built around.

The lower row is the voicing after the fact. TONE is a post-distortion lowpass that pulls the fizz down from 22 kHz to 500 Hz, reading OFF at the top of its range. MID scoops or humps at the archetype’s own centre frequency — scooped for modern and metal flavours, humped for a lead that has to cut. MIX blends against the dry signal, which is how you keep chords intelligible: distortion on a bus makes notes intermodulate, so a parallel dry path preserves the harmony while the wet path supplies the aggression. LEVEL is the clean trim on top of the auto make-up.

About that make-up: DRIVE holds the peak steady by construction, but not the loudness. As the cascade converts dynamics into harmonics it lifts everything that was quiet, and the average level climbs with it — around 6 dB by the top of the knob, more in FUZZ. AUTO measures that per archetype and takes it back out, so you can run the knob end to end and hear the sound change without the level chasing you. Switch it off when you want the drive to push.

The distortion arrives already patched: in the default chain it takes the BitCrusher’s output and feeds the chorus. The patchbay allows sharper tricks — it can sit inside the delay’s, chorus’s or reverb’s feedback loop, so every repeat comes back dirtier than the last. The patchbay chapter (Chapter 5 — Mixer & Patchbay) maps those routes.

BitCrusher: controlled damage

Two knobs do the damage. BITS redraws the waveform on a coarser amplitude grid: at the top of its range the grid is fine enough to be transparent, and as it comes down the wave turns to audible steps. The quantizer is dithered the way a real converter is, so through the upper and middle of the range quiet passages and decays dissolve into a gentle noise floor instead of cutting out; keep going down and the dither fades away on purpose, leaving raw grit and, at the very bottom, gated crackle. The control is continuous, and fractional bit depths shift the grid smoothly, so a modulated BITS sweeps rather than clicking between settings. FREQ is a virtual sample rate: at the top of the knob the decimator is off — genuinely off, at any host rate — and as it comes down, a hold-style resampler makes the folded-back image frequencies audible — the classic downsampled alias sheen. This is the one place in the instrument where aliasing is the point. DRIVE is a soft clip before the quantizer; a touch of it tames spiky inputs so they do not splatter into huge quantization jumps, and more of it thickens the crush. It is loudness-compensated, so what grows is density, not volume.

The crush can also be played in tune. Flip TRACK and the FREQ knob becomes RATIO: the virtual sample rate follows the note you play, RATIO × the fundamental. Because the rate moves with the pitch, the alias partials keep the same musical interval on every key — at whole-number ratios they lock into the harmonic series and the sheen becomes part of the chord instead of a fixed hiss over it. Note changes lock the tracked rate instantly, so the alias pattern is stable from the first sample of every attack. Each mode remembers its own knob position, so flipping TRACK back restores the absolute rate you had dialed.

The TRACK, RISE and WIDE switches sit in the section header beside the power button; the five knobs — MIX, BITS, FREQ (or RATIO), DRIVE and TONE — run in a single row beneath them. RISE changes the quantizer’s grid: the default (mid-tread) has a level at zero, which is where the gated crackle at low BITS comes from; RISE has no zero level, so quiet passages sputter between the two nearest steps instead of cutting out — at 1 bit it is a true rail-to-rail comparator. WIDE runs separate left and right capture clocks half a period apart, so the two channels crush at different instants and the grit spreads across the stereo field. TONE, the last knob in the row, is a lowpass after the damage — pull it down to tame the alias sheen while the steps stay.

The BitCrusher is a single node in the routing system, and its character changes with its address. Feed it one oscillator directly and that line alone turns to grit while the others stay clean. Put it after the delay and the tails degrade like worn media. Run it in parallel against the clean mix for weight without total destruction. Its controls have their own panel on the FX tab, and BITS, FREQ, MIX, DRIVE and TONE are all modulation destinations, so the damage can move with the music.

The freezer: catch a moment and hold it

The freezer is a tape-stop that never lets go. While the module is on it is quietly recording recent input into a rolling buffer; press FREEZE and that recording stops moving, and instead of the live signal you hear a short slice of the captured audio looped back seamlessly — a sustained pad conjured out of a single instant. Let go and the live sound returns. The freeze is a fast crossfade at both ends, so catching a chord mid-phrase or stuttering the button in time never clicks.

Four knobs shape what you froze. WINDOW sets how much recent audio the capture holds — from 100 ms (a tight stutter) up to two seconds (a wide, evolving pad) — and so bounds how far POSITION can reach back. GRAIN sets the length of the looped slice, from a tight, almost pitched fragment up to a slow half-second swell. POSITION is where in the captured window that slice reads from — at the bottom it sits on the oldest audio in the window, at the top on the newest, the instant you froze, so turning it up seeks forward through the last thing you played without ever crossing a seam. MIX blends the frozen texture underneath anything you keep playing live, so the freeze becomes a drone to solo over rather than a hard replacement. MODE picks the character: SMOOTH is the clean sustained loop, REVERSE plays the grains backwards, and CLOUD scatters four overlapping copies — now decorrelated left and right for real stereo width — into a diffuse, choir-like wash that smears away the metallic tint a single tight loop can have.

SYNC locks the freezer to the beat, the same switch the chorus and reverb carry: with it on, WINDOW and GRAIN become musical time divisions instead of milliseconds — a window of one bar and grains of 1/16 turn a frozen chord into a texture that loops in time with the song, and stuttering FREEZE from a step sequencer lands every repeat on the grid. The divisions track the host tempo live, so a tempo change re-tunes the whole texture without touching a knob.

None of it clicks because the loop is built to hide its own edges: two windowed copies of the grain are always crossfading, arranged so that at the instant one copy wraps around it is silent while its partner sits at full volume in the middle of the grain. The seam is always covered. Grain size, position, mix and window are all smoothed too, so scrubbing the knobs — or aiming an LFO at them — glides instead of stepping. And because FREEZE is a control rather than a plain button, it is itself a modulation destination that engages on any positive value: a square — or any bipolar — LFO or mod step-seq on FREEZE turns the effect into a rhythmic stutter that grabs and drops the sound in time, while an LFO on POSITION makes the frozen loop drift through its buffer on its own. The FREEZE button lights whenever the freeze is actually engaged — by hand or by modulation — so a gated stutter shows on the panel. FREEZE, POSITION, GRAIN, MIX and WINDOW are all modulation targets.

Like every effect here it is one node in the routing graph, and by default it sits just after the reverb on the way to the master — freeze the tail of a reverb and it blooms into an endless pad. Move it earlier to freeze a dry oscillator, or run it in parallel for a frozen layer beside the live line. Its panel is on the FX tab, below the BitCrusher — WINDOW, GRAIN, POSITION and MIX, with the FREEZE latch, the mode picker and SYNC in the header; its output level rides the FREEZER fader on the mixer.

The master section: the last inch of the signal

Every path through the instrument ends here. Once the routing graph has summed everything headed for the output — dry cables, effect outputs, oscillator directs — the master bus runs one fixed chain on that sum: high-pass, box cut and brilliance, then stereo control, then volume and the limiter. The tone controls live in the MASTER FX panel on the FX tab; the stereo controls sit on the Mixer tab next to the goniometer. The limiter itself is a global on/off with a single control — a compact L button in the header, reachable from any tab, just past the output meters.

The master tone stage is three continuous knobs. HPF sweeps the corner from 20 Hz to 400 Hz, with the bottom of the range reading OFF — so you can trim exactly as much rumble as the track needs rather than picking from fixed steps. BOOST adds a resonant emphasis right at that corner: at 0 dB the slope is a clean Butterworth, and as you raise it the cutoff becomes a deliberate bump that can make the low end feel tighter and louder even as everything below it is removed. BOX CUT scoops the congested, boxy low-mids around 400 Hz — sweep the depth in dB until the mix opens up. BRILLIANCE is a high-shelf at 4.5 kHz with a twist: AMOUNT sets the lift, and DRIVE saturates the lifted band, generating new harmonics above what the patch contains — a clean shelf at zero drive, an exciter when pushed.

Then the image, which lives on the Mixer tab (Chapter 5 — Mixer & Patchbay) beside the goniometer — the display you need to judge it by. STEREO WIDTH scales the whole picture, from fully collapsed — the honest way to hear what a mono system receives — through unchanged, to tripled. MONO BASS is the anchor: below the frequency you set, the two channels are summed to the center, so the low end stays planted on big systems no matter how wide the rest of the patch swims. Width where it helps, mono where it matters.

The sub oscillator has an escape route of its own: SUB DIRECT — the FX BYPASS switch on the sub’s Oscillators-tab header and its mixer strip, mirrored by the patchbay’s SUB → OUT cable — routes it around the effects and the master tone stages, straight to the output bus, so the foundation stays clean and centered while everything above it is shifted, frozen, crushed or widened.

Last in line is the true-peak limiter, on by default. It is a safety ceiling, not a loudness tool: leave it on and the occasional resonance spike or feedback swell is caught before it clips the output; switch it off at the header’s L button if you would rather handle overs in your own chain. Its on/off state is global rather than stored in a preset, so it stays where you set it as you browse sounds.

The limiter is also the plug-in’s only source of latency. Switched on it looks 1.5 ms ahead of the signal and reports that to the host, which compensates so everything stays in time. Switched off there is nothing to compensate: the output is the input, undelayed, and the reported latency is zero. Flipping the switch therefore genuinely changes the plug-in’s delay and asks the host to redo delay compensation across the project — the instrument crossfades the change over about ten milliseconds so it smears rather than steps, but it is a set-and-forget switch rather than a performance control. With the limiter as the final stage, nothing in this chapter — not runaway delay feedback, not a frozen reverb under a fresh bass line — has to be timid. Push the effects as far as the music wants; the exit is guarded.