Effect that adds tone to non-tonal sounds

[pardeep21]

No I don't mate but I might have to because the more I hear about all the little cool tools more I want to try it out, I used a demo bitd but It's come a hell of a long way since then I just ignored it because of the stigma attatched to it shame on me.

[Unaspected]

Ah. It's been capable of these things for many years. Just that, a few years back, it was given a graphical overhaul. However, there have been some much more needed basic features that have been introduced more recently and development seems to be on a roll right now.

I wish I could recommend some third party tools for a task like this. Only thing that comes to mind is Blue Cat Audio's envelope follower - possibly part of the gain suite. Reaper can do it without third party plugins but it's a pain to set up. Bitwig has an envelope follower but I've yet to road test that DAW.

If you have Live then you'll have Max and there are plenty of sound manglers in there - all the vocoding, resonating and envelope following you could ever need. Related to that, there is always the freely available Pure Data. Or, indeed, Reaktor has plenty of tools for this kind of task.

[pardeep21]

Great, I heard about the amazing envelope following capabilities of Reaper but it just never clicked with me. one last thing will the envelope follower follow the pitch movement or is that where the vocoder comes in? What I never liked about vocoders is that you cant change the modulator to be an external sound, so your stuck with everything having a vocodey sound unless the tools have moved on from that?

[metalifuxx]

Ring mod or frequency shifter, or vocode it with another signal.

[metalifuxx]

A pitch shifter/octave with the pitch tracking/follow set so its not that accurate will give you sometimes musical sounding glitchiness

[Unaspected]

Great, I heard about the amazing envelope following capabilities of Reaper but it just never clicked with me. one last thing will the envelope follower follow the pitch movement or is that where the vocoder comes in? What I never liked about vocoders is that you cant change the modulator to be an external sound, so your stuck with everything having a vocodey sound unless the tools have moved on from that?

Yeah, that's where the vocoder comes in and is likely the easiest method for what you want to achieve.

I wouldn't call Reaper's envelope following abilities "amazing". It's expandable with scripting but out of the box, FL Studio beats it for accuracy and efficiency for all modulation/automation options. Though, in terms of CPU efficiency, Reaper is king.

Most powerful will be Max and other modular environments.

Another plugin that popped into my head, with regards to the OP is "Objeq Delay" by Applied Acoustics: https://www.applied-acoustics.com/objeq-delay/ currently on sale and might be worth checking out.

[Sampleconstruct]

Besides the usual suspects already mentioned Zynaptiq Pitch Map is also good for these tasks.

[Ah_Dziz]

A resonant filter can be excited by any input at any chosen frequency. Same with short delays with a good bit of feedback and then there are fun fft tricks to do the same.

[Ah_Dziz]

Then you can also chain many of these fun things and add reverb etc into the chain.

[Razzia]

I use often AAS Objeq delay for that (just bypass the delay module).

Same. Also, if OP is an Ableton Live user, there's corpus, which is basically just Objeq Delay with the delay bypassed (and in interface that kind of just looks like the parameters were strewn about randomly, but you get used to it)

[Unaspected]

I use often AAS Objeq delay for that (just bypass the delay module).

Same. Also, if OP is an Ableton Live user, there's corpus, which is basically just Objeq Delay with the delay bypassed (and in interface that kind of just looks like the parameters were strewn about randomly, but you get used to it)

Apologies, Klinke. I must have read your post unconsciously.

[pardeep21]

Great replies thank you, I think i'll mess around with abletons envelope follower, vocoder and corpus to start with this weekend

[Arrested Developer]

Sometimes I have a sound which is say quite percussive or bottom & top heavy but not much middle, but i like the character or shape of it but i'd like to make it more harmonic/tonal rather than percussive etc trying to think what this plugin type would be called, does anyone know of any plugins that do this, where you can add new harmonics to an already existing frequency image.

There are two different basic approaches:

- the first one is to add spectral content.
All kinds of saturators, distortion etc. add harmonic overtones. So, if you want to make a specific sounds more tonal, this is the safest way.
With FM and AM synthesis you can also add spectral content. These tools easily allow non harmonic components.

- The second approach deals with spectral content that's already in the signal.
Resonators and EQs can bring out imminent spectral content. (Self oscillating resonators also can generate harmonic content on their own.)

The many mentioned tools mostly fall into one (or both) of these categories. But you can also get creative and build your own signal chains.

[Chandlerhimself]

MCombfilter and MCombfilterMB can do this. They can work as resonators and you can easily chose whichever pitch you like. If you don't need the sounds to be tonal, a saturator would be a safe bet.