Dry sound sits in your face; sound with a room around it sits in a world. Track effects hang on the whole track — tails ring across notes — and attach with one pipe.
play pluck line |> reverb 0.7 puts the whole track in a hall; the number is the size/decay of the room. plate is its brighter studio cousin.
|> pingpong (1/8c) 0.35 is a stereo delay bouncing left-right every eighth of a cycle — the time is musical, so echoes land on the grid at any tempo. Feedback sets how many repeats.
Track effects chain in order: |> reverb 0.6 |> pingpong (1/8c) 0.3 reverbs the notes then echoes the wet room — swap them and you echo first, reverb the echoes.
Name a chain once, reuse it everywhere: hall = \\t -> t |> plate 0.8 is a track transform — pipe any track into it (at the END of the chain: play … |> gainTrack 0.8 |> hall).
The starting point#
The lesson opens with this song in the editor. Every edit recompiles and plays.
-- Space: two bone-dry tracks. Put a world around them.
pluck = patch {
source = saw (freq pitch),
ampEnv = adsr 1ms 140ms 0 90ms,
cutoff = 1600Hz,
gain = vel * 0.5
}
pad = patch {
source = saw (freq pitch) + saw (freq pitch + 9Cents),
ampEnv = adsr 300ms 0ms 1 600ms,
cutoff = 1000Hz,
gain = vel * 0.3
}
line = play pluck !"c3 ~ eb3 g3 ~ bb3 g3 ~"
pads = play pad !"c2 ~ ab1 ~"What to watch#
Reverb fills the gaps: the waveform no longer returns to the centre line between notes, and the tail keeps ringing after the last one.
Goals#
The workbench checks these as you work; the solution is there when you want it.
- Put the track in a room — reverb or plate, 0.4+
- Echo in tempo — pingpong, delayTrack, or tape
- Stretch: name a reusable chain
Make it yours#
Give the pluck a tiny room and the pad a huge one — then swap them and hear why mixing engineers cry.
Further reading#
The effects reference in the reference.