Morphing Effects Processor
I have no idea if this is feasible, but I would love to see a hardware port of an old outboard FX unit called the Lexicon Vortex. I still have one of these in the loft, it dates back to the mid-90’s and I’m surprised they never became more popular. Basically, it did fairly standard effects like a resonator/ring mod, and various delay based flange/chorus type modulation. The killer feature was ‘morphing’ between presets. You could change between two versions of the same effect for something basic like speeding up a rotary speaker effect, or morph from one effect into a completely different one, making completely new effects in between: “Morphing is a complete parametric and algorithmic restructuring of two independent effects, rather than a simple crossfade and you can morph between any two effects you have created.” It wouldn’t need too many controls, because the whole point was to morph between two sets of pre-configured parameters and if you were modulating them already by CV it wouldn’t work in the same way. The ‘B’ presets were supposed to be more extreme. The original just had wet/dry and input gain knobs, stereo in/outs and a rotary selector with 16 presets. Which patch you morphed to was stored as part of the preset, and there was an A/B footswitch input which you would replicate with a CV trigger. The morph time was stored as part of the preset, and went up to 30 seconds. That could be CV controlled, and you would also need some way editing the presets and which one you morph to. There weren’t many parameters on the original, so maybe split the panel in two sections, A and B. Four parameter knobs on each side, and maybe eight buttons in each section, controlling which effect is active on either side of the A/B ‘morph’.
I know very little about DSP, but if something like Clouds has been done then this should be possible in theory? Although with Lexicon being a big corporation and the algorithms being proprietary…I don’t know. Article if you’re interested:
Edit: link to manual, containing FX block diagrams: https://lexiconpro.com/en/product_documents/vortex_multi_user_guidepdf