Effect that adds tone to non-tonal sounds

[pardeep21]

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.

[Forgotten]

I'd suggest resonators, filters and distortion.

[deastman]

Yeah I’d say look at resonator effects.

[Benedict]

I thought a Resonator from the Title but if you want to add nice harmonics then EQ is better.

But try a Combo of Resonator, Sauturation & EQ.

[pardeep21]

ok thanks i used resonators years ago but they always gave a trademark 'resonator' / vocodery type sound, seems like they have improved somewhat nowadays i will experiment, mix a bit of resonator with other effects to try and avoid that

[Andrew Souter]

https://2caudio.com/products/kaleidoscope#_overview

[Klinke]

I use often AAS Objeq delay for that (just bypass the delay module). Also PSP PianoVerb can be worth a try (especially as the plugins is free).

[foosnark]

My first thought is "oscillator through VCA, controlled by an envelope follower on your percussion".

Or a high-Q bandpass filter mixed in with the dry signal.

Or a very short delay with high feedback.

[Unaspected]

If you have access to FL Studio then Edison's Blur tool might be worth checking out.

[Forgotten]

ok thanks i used resonators years ago but they always gave a trademark 'resonator' / vocodery type sound, seems like they have improved somewhat nowadays i will experiment, mix a bit of resonator with other effects to try and avoid that

You should be able to control that, particularly with wet/dry balance once you find suitable resonant frequencies.

[Tritik]

https://www.tritik.com/products/moodal/

[DJ Warmonger]

Another options are piling up a granular cloud or delay with times falling into sonic range.

[Smapti]

As others have noted, a tunable comb filter will add pitch. Lots of plugins have this (eg Absynth, Byome/Triad, Molekular). In fact Molekular has lots of pitch-creation algorithms: you can create custom pitch groups and then the effects will quantize to those pitches. There's a comb filter there too but also more exotic pitch creation techniques like FFT-based and granular stuff.

[pardeep21]

sweet lot's of cool stuff to try i'm sure i'll find what i'm looking for, one thing i was thinking if i could somehow copy the envelope/waveform 'image' of one sound and imprint it onto another, kind of like a match eq where you can take a snapshot but for the overall shape of the wave rather than frequencies, so if the source descends in pitch and amplitude,so does the 2nd sound automatically.

every envelope follower i've found just matches the 1st sounds wave shape to the 2nd sounds filter cutoff. Anyone used anything like this?

[Unaspected]

sweet lot's of cool stuff to try i'm sure i'll find what i'm looking for, one thing i was thinking if i could somehow copy the envelope/waveform 'image' of one sound and imprint it onto another, kind of like a match eq where you can take a snapshot but for the overall shape of the wave rather than frequencies, so if the source descends in pitch and amplitude,so does the 2nd sound automatically.

every envelope follower i've found just matches the 1st sounds wave shape to the 2nd sounds filter cutoff. Anyone used anything like this?

An envelope follower should be attachable to any parameter. I'm guessing from what you have written that you don't have access to FL Studio as this kind of thing would be very simple. Equally so with their vocoder - which is a great method for imparting characteristics of one sound onto another.

Regardless of which DAW you are using, those would be the two main things that come to mind: Envelope followers and vocoders.