Detection Transposer

Greetings Schwa folks -

I know - Tin Man isn’t your only project - and many of the other plugins likely sell a little better than TinMan, and I VERY much understand the need to weigh user enhancement request with the time/effort that would be required to implement any given feature, but:

I use TinMan ALL the time. Love it. But every single time I use it I wish for a way to transpose the frequencies that TinMan is detecting. That is, when it “hears” that the most prominent notes in my pad are C, G and D, I would VERY much like to be able to transpose those detected notes up an octave (or a fifth…ideally any musical interval…but Octaves and Fifths will likely work best) so that TinMan engages a resonant filter an octave above these fundemental frequencies. Why? Well, What I am finding is that when I play guitar or pads though TinMan, what I end up with is a situation where TinMan is “hearing” all these low frequencies contained in my audio content and (quite properly) opening up these wonderful resonant filters. But the frequency of the filter is so low, and the volume so loud, that I get these large ‘bursts’ of resonant sound - if I was able to shift the resonant filter up an octave, what I could achieve is having TinMan open up filters which are an octave above these fundementals, and are therefore somewhat quieter and actually “need” enhancing.
What I do to try to achieve the same effect is: Set the Low detection note to a fairly high point (Middle A on the keyboard in the UI), and then set my detection threshold as low as it will go. This helps some by only enhancing the higher harmonics of my sound…but MOST of the time I have to turn the threshold all the way to it’s most sensitive setting to achieve the effect I want because these higher harmonics just aren’t as loud. And MOST of the time I STILL cant get TinMan to trigger on these higher harmonics. So my next work around is to put a gain control before TinMan, boost the gain into Tinman by 12db and this helps some with my work around.
But, nonetheless, I think the effect of being able to control the resonant filter which is effecting the harmonics of a sound using the most prominant fundimental frequencies of that sound, would really enhance TinMan’s abilities. It’s a BEAUTIFUL effect for adding some motion and dynamic aspects to pads and guitar…I think this would make it even nice.

And it “shouldn’t be that hard to code” (If I had a penny for every time someones said that to me!) as what I expect it would be is a matter of taking the results from the pitch detection algorithm and just multiplying the frequency by 2 before sending that info on to the resonant filter selection section of the plug… but that’s total speculation based on assumptions about the way you are accomplishing this effect.

In any case - the request is in and I would VERY much appreciate your thoughts on it.

With all the warmest regards - Keep up the great work,

Vance

Agreed, this is a common request and you’re quite right - it would be great. We did actually have a tuning control in an early build, but it wasn’t very effective because most of the time it would be working on frequencies that just weren’t there. But disposing of the whole feature, rather than just limiting it (to, say. -1, 0, +1, +2 octaves) does seem to have been a missed opportunity, that I think would be very interesting to look at again. Not right now though, Schwa is a very busy for reasons that will become clear very soon :wink:

May I suggest using Tinman on an aux bus/send track/WhateverItsCalledInYourDAW like a reverb? Alternatively you could just duplicate the track and use Tinman on the second track.

The purpose of this:
After creating a parallel signal path in one of the aforementioned ways, you could send the signal through a pitch shifter first and then into Tinman. Set Tinman’s Mix control all the way to ‘wet’ (so you don’t hear the pitch shifted signal direct), set the pitch shifter to the wanted interval and that should do roughly the same.

Using Tinman after other FX like delays or reverbs is one of the many great things you could do with it. :slight_smile: