Transformant

VST effects plugin

Transformant provides a multichannel formant filter effect that is tailored to provide gritty, honking, nasal grunts rather than pristine angelic choirs.

The sounds can be shaped across the stereo field using separate oscillator and vowel controls while the audio can be routed through a distortion chain to really accent the odd harmonics created by the filter.

Transformant works best on spectrally rich input (such as sawtooth bass or drums), but with subtle adjustment of its controls you will never know what kind of otherworldly howls you can extract from the most mundane of sound sources.

If you wish to hear the plugins sound design qualities in action, Transformant is the leading effect on Drosophelia's Detractor.

Controls

Transformants control groups come in four distinct sections:

1. Entry stage
2. Formant stage
3. Distortion stage
4. Output stage

1. Entry stage

This is where we determine which part of the incoming signal will be processed before it enters the main (Formant) effects stage. The single Threshold control adjusts the ceiling above which the formant filtering will be applied. At the lowest (leftmost) setting, the threshold is at -60 dB which means all audio will be filtered. At the highest (rightmost) setting, the threshold is at 0, meaning none of the signal will be filtered.

On signals with long sustained tones at near-constant dynamic pressure the fully applied formant signal can be a bit much, by adjusting the threshold until it only applies to the highest peaks you can create a blend between effected loud sounds and the unprocessed signal (which can add a lot of interest to percussive parts).

2. Formant stage

The controls for the formant stage are mirrored across the left and right side of the stereo field, where the Sync control can be used to link the two channels controls (where the right channel will mimic the settings of the left).

• Vowel interpolates between A, E, O, I, U vowel sounds
• Speed controls the speed* of an oscillator that modulates the vowel
• Depth controls the intensity of the modulated vowel range

*When the oscillator speed is set to 0, the oscillator is disabled making the vowel sound static.

Transformant automatically applies makeup gain processing to keep the signal level equal throughout the formant shifts (as by its nature formant filtering can create large differences when accenting different frequencies).

3. Distortion stage

Where we apply a bit of grit to the signal using the following controls:

• Drive the amount of distortion applied to the signal
• Crush toggle between wave shaping and bit crushing algorithms
• Post mix whether to apply the distortion before or after the formant stage*

*When applied before the formant stage, it's actually applied before the entry stage: this is deliberate as it allows you to get more threshold control on signals with large dynamic movement.

4. Output stage

The last step before audio is returned to the host application. This contains a single Dry/wet control which allows you to create a balance between the effected (wet) signal and the unprocessed (dry) input.