Tips for creating ambient shoegaze in VCV

This patch has a shoe gaze effect stack in it (in fact, it was inspired by this thread).

“Waves of distortion” in the patch is triggered with a quantized sample & hold for the pitch fed into a simple Additator VCO with just a few partials. And then the fun begins:

  • ASR envelope but leaving 40% sustain in the ungated region so it sounds continuous
  • heavy vacuumba distortion
  • phaser
  • chronoblob with 60% feedback and 0.8 (modulated) seconds ping-pong delay
  • compressor to bring up the loudness troughs and shave off the peaks
  • debriatus for the grit
  • some filtering to get the highest pitches out (but not too much, 12 dB is good) and some hefty resonance in
  • reverb
  • and a fairly heavy chorus

All with quite a bit of modulation provided by an ochd LFO.

In the video it kicks in around 1:00 then fades out a bit and really kicks in at around 2:15 to the end. Pretty complex sound for what essentially starts out as a monophonic nearly sine wave. And that’s just the one voice I gave the full effects treatment :wink:

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