Custom Chorus & Flangers

Chorus and flanging are useful Deepfield tutorials because the audible effect comes from a small number of principles: very short delay, continuous delay-time modulation, mixing, and sometimes feedback.

Chorus: the basic structure

Start with a dry/wet split. Put a ModDelay or suitably short delay on the wet path and modulate its delay-time input from an LFO.

                -> dry ---------------------> Mix -> Out
Audio In -> split
                -> ModDelay <- LFO ----------^

Use a small delay range and a slow LFO. The modulation should move the delay smoothly; parameter-rate stepping is much more audible on a short delay than it is on a one-second echo.

Stereo chorus

For stereo, use two wet voices with phase or rate differences. A MultiLFO is useful when you truly need several phase-related modulation voices; for one voice per channel, two simple/synchronised LFO paths may be easier to reason about.

Pan or route the wet voices so the modulation does not collapse to mono.

Flanger

A flanger uses a shorter delay range and generally stronger dry/wet comb interaction. Add controlled feedback around the short delay for the metallic resonant sweep associated with stronger flanging.

For an extreme DJ-style flange, the impression usually comes from the combination of:

  • very short moving delay;
  • large, deliberate sweep depth;
  • high but controlled feedback;
  • a sweep that reaches close enough to the zero-delay region to make the comb motion obvious;
  • useful input/output level controls so the effect remains manageable.

If the LFO simply drives a control into Clamp for much of its cycle, the audible sweep can flatten at the extremes. Scale/map the modulation so most of the LFO range remains inside the musically useful delay interval.

Tempo-synchronised sweep

Use TempoSelector to derive the sweep rate from host tempo. For a single LFO, feed its frequency/rate from the tempo-derived control path. Use MultiLFO when several phase-locked voices are actually required.

Pitch impression

Rapid modulation of delay time creates a Doppler-like pitch change. The amount of apparent pitch sweep is determined mainly by how far and how fast delay time moves, not by a separate pitch-shift module.

If a comb/flanger sweep feels too shallow, inspect the actual mapped delay-time range first.