Exploring Sound Design Tools: Wormhole
/Today I’m having a look at Zynaptiq’s Wormhole, a quite versatile warping, pitch bending plugin to use on sound effects, voice over and even musical elements.
Interface & Features
Wormhole has a few sections that operate more or less independently. It features the usual BIG wheel/knob thingy that other Zynaptiq’s pugins usually use, which in this case shifts the main warping effect up or down.
So if we look at the plugin’s signal flow, we see that it mainly consists of a warping section and shifting section. Both the dry and wet signals can be then delayed and finally reverb can be added at the very end or just after the main sections.
If we have a nother look at the UI, we can see where each of these sections live:
Warping
So let’s have a look at the Warp section which is the main feature of this plugin. Zynaptiq describes it as “proprietary time-domain local spectrum inversion“. Somewhat similar to a ring modulator but capable of producing unique sounds. Let’s see its settings:
Warp Depth: This adjust the frequency spectrum affected, low values will only affect high frequencies, while higher values will affect the whole spectrum but would give a milder result. To me, changing this value kind of feels like pitch shifting in a way. You can hear some examples here:
Poles: Increasing this value tightens up the frequencies and harmonics generated around an specific pitch while lower values create a more smeared sound. So use higher values if you want a thinned out type of sound. All the examples below where recorded while depth was at 50%.
Tilt: This shifts the whole warped spectrum up or down. So it kind of works like frequency shifting but with formant distorting qualities. This is what we control with the big circular knob.
Filter: This is just a simple low-pass filter than can be used after the warp and poles parameters (Pre) or afterthe tilt process (Post). The pre setting is generally better to create broken sounds, while post will result in cleaner results. Personally, I generally don’t notice much of a difference between pre and post.
Shifting
The shifting section is the other main feature Wormhole offers We find both frequency and pitch shifting. The difference between these two is that with frequency shifting, we are just moving all frequencies the same amount up or down which will results in more dramatic changes for low frequencies, musically speaking but far smaller changes for higher ones. In this sense, we could perfectly shift the fundamental note but the harmonics won’t be in the correct place since they are higher frequency. Pitch shifting, on the other hand, takes this into consideration and moves higher frequencies exponentially further away so the result sounds musical.
Let’s have a look at the settings that it offers so we can understand how it works:
Frequency Shift: It goes from -4000 Hz to +4000 Hz. Yeah, Hz, not semitones since this is frequency shift, not pitch shift. There are two modes here, linear and map. I see that map is the default option as it offers more granular change around 0 while the extremes change pitch in a more dramatic way.
Decay Time: Frequencies that play for longer than the desired time, will be discarded. So at the maximum value, nothing will change but as the value is lower the sound tends to dry out, reverb and noise can be reduced.
Pitch Shift: This is the proper pitch shift section and it uses 4 different modes:
Smooth: +/- 48 Semitones, optmized for low transient sounds.
Thight: +/- 48 Semitones, optimized for transient heavy sounds
Detune A: +/- 48 cents where L and R channels are shifted to produce a widening effect. Tight algorithm.
Detune B: +/- 48 cents where L and R channels are shifted to produce a widening effect. Smooth algorithm.
Other Features
We can also find a simple reverb with size and damp controls plus wet/dry controls for each individual section (Warp, Shift and Reverb). These three sections can change in routing order too.
Additionally, there is a blend section that offers something a bit more powerful than a simple master wet/dry mix control. When processing audio, you usually can hear the dry and wet at the same time, instead of a new, unique sound. Wormhole offers you a different way of blending dry and wet as the sound is gradually processed so you can have much smoother transitions and interesting intermediate states. Let’s see the modes it offers:
X-Fade: Normal dy/wet mix.
Morph A: Uses the properties of the wet signal to create the intermediate states.
Morph B: Uses the dry signal as the base, resulting in more subtle blending.
Finally, Wormhole has a delay value so you can blend dry and wet with a timing difference.