Tonight I’ve been having a little fun using the Arpeggiator as a sort of MIDI delay.
In this example, I’m using it for a rapid, slapback echo sort of effect that you might otherwise produce with the Simple Delay. I’m only feeding in one note at a time (not holding down chords the way you would for standard arpeggiation), and triggering a very short synth percussion sound.
The key parts of the setup above are:
The Rate is in Free mode, rather than sync. This allows for some very rapid repetitions. The number of repetitions is determined by the length of the MIDI note you send into it. As long as the note is held down, it will repeat every 96.4ms.
Gate is set to 50%. This means that every note the Arpeggiator outputs will be half the length of the Gate setting – 48.2ms in this case. By adjusting this parameter, you can make the repeated notes really short and choppy or nice and long.
So, this simple setup is similar a regular audio delay in that its generating a few quick repeats of every note, but it’s different in a few ways:
– every repeat is the same volume as the original note
– the number of repeats is easily controlled by changing the length of the MIDI notes
– the duration of the individual notes is controlled by the Gate control, which can be automated
There are a number of settings on the Arpeggiator that can be changed to make it behave more like a delay effect, and some others that take it into a totally different realm. We’ll take a deeper look in upcoming tips.
