Vibrato - Pure Data Part 4

This week on The Pick we're taking a look at building vibrato effects in Pure Data. In the late 1940s Gibson began building vibrato circuits into their electric instrument amplifiers, and hardware vibratos of the 1980s are still highly sought after today, but by building our own audio effects we can tweak and develop them without being limited by parameters suggested by digital effects developers and hopefully create a useable effect!

Vibrato is a slow, often subtle audio effect which uses pitch shifting in a similar way to the subtle string bending many instrumentalists use to give movement to melodies. It’s sound is often used for creating the shimmering, swirling sound heard with a Rhodes piano or Hammond organ and was widely used throughout the psychedelic 60s.

The patch below uses a low frequency oscillator to alter the pitch of the input audio. You can effect the depth of the LFO, the frequency and the amount of wet signal mixed with the through dry signal. I’ve written some suggested boundaries for each number slider, but experiment with other limits to maybe create some original effects!

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