in my sick head there are 3-4 main groups of building blocks and techniques:

1. traditional effects or methods (echo, flanger, FIR filter, poles filter, distortion...)

2. combinations of these effects (multiband echo, flanger which only affects the peaks, distortion AND frequency filter together)

3. complex processes, which can include offline editing, the way you use midi, but also processes for immersive audio, granular effects, or programs like melodyne, spear, the tau editor, an analog vocoder, you name it. stuff which you do not just drag and drop and press "on" to make a hit, but rather fiddle for hours with it and build a custom instrument.

4. #1 has a subgroup, which is the layer i work the mosts: a collection of building blocks, which are alone not yet an effect, but needed to build some of them (FFT, interpolation methods, modulation methods, something which plays a sample, something which loops a sample, something which records the stream into RAM buffer, hilbert transform, peak history analysis, this kind of stuff.)


when you try to combine all 4 levels into a single, monolithic masterprocess you will never come to an end and record a song, but you can easily kill a whole week with totally interesting nonsense, just because you can.

 

I just came up with a trick, probably some big-name engineer has already invented, but I've not seen it anywhere (perhaps heard though?). For lack of a better name, I call it "inverse gate reverb".

You know when you want to immerse and soak an ambient recording, or percussion or something, in that big reverb but hate it when a louder sound pops up and creates that huge "splash" sound. This is the trick for you!

Set-up:

• Create a pre-FX send from the track you want to add reverb to
• On the return track add a gate set it up to only pass audio when the level is below the threshold
• Use enough lookahead on the gate so you can eat all the transients (e.g. 10ms)
• Add a nice reverb after it, like a longish stereo plate
• Tweak the threshold so you get suitable amount of signal into it

This way the loud transients are not reverbed, but the rest are. Pre-FX sends work best because compression and such will raise the amount of signal kind of killing the effect if everything is above the threshold and nothing below. Probably best served track by track basis.

I tried this with ambient pad swells and it's nice there too, lower levels sound deep and afar and once the sweep rises it kind of jumps into focus.

 

A rabbit hole i went down in my eurorack adventures are FREQUENCY SHIFTERS, and more importantly using them in delay feedback loops and varied copies in the stereo field. A freq shifter does not maintain the harmonic relationships like a pitchshifter and can be used in much more creative/low-level ways.

I have the Xaoc Devices Kozsalin Shiftor which has some really interesting features such as TZFM input, internal feedback routing (regen/density) and simultaneous up & down shifted stereo outputs, BUT every modern DAW has a frequency shifter, and all of this can be achieved in software.



the kozsalin manual may give some patch ideas: https://xaocdevices.com/manuals/xaoc_koszalin_manual.pdf
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I highly recommend this article on perfect circuit:
https://www.perfectcircuit.com/signal/frequency-shifters

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And for more history on the famous Bode/Moog analog design, this page has all of the circuitry and math behind it:
https://www.interestingelectronics....onics/frequency_shifter/frequency_shifter.htm