What To Do With: The Signal Follower

Tips & Tricks
41

To keep my mixes clean I sometimes use the signal follower to simulate a kind of gated reverb. Just follow the original signal and trigger the dry/wet amount of your reverb with it. Full track amplitude = your max. wet amount. Dry/wet settings of course depend on your needs. Makes your instruments sound huge while playing without filling the whole mix with unwanted reverb tails afterwards.

Same works vice versa for delays. To prevent muddy freqs and too much chaos I sometimes use the signal follower to make a track suppress its own delay effect, triggering (supressing) the send amount with the original signal.

Cheers,

-BA

42

Great thread… I bump it, just in case recent members of the forum haven’t seen it. Sometimes with the features my brain goes like this too :panic: lol… than I don’t try them out, and then I don’t figure out how easy they are… lol… so I just tried the signal follower this morning, because I was dying for some ducked arpeggio bassline stuff… the signal follower is the totally the way to do it… and its so easy!!! Ah! Mysteries of Renoise…

43

i’m glad people still like to mess with the follower :)

44

It’s an irreplaceable tool for me. Great for shaping drum sounds and doing side-compression.

45

I mainly use signal follower just like envelope follower in synths, or like in moog’s mf-107. You can apply it to frequency in ring modulation or filter cutoff or pitch or lfo frequency etc. Anyway, it works best with guitar, stabs etc where amplitude often changes.

46

Automating the signal follower’s controls can add another level of effect.

For instance, an lfo on the ‘min’ or ‘max’ can add ‘randomness’. Sometimes it’s fun/cool/useful to automate ‘attack’, ‘release’, or ‘sensitivity’.

Having vocals open the Q on BR filters of other, competing instruments; for instance, if the vocals are ‘strong’ in the 500hz range, have those same vocals ‘opening a q’ on a BR filter set to 500hz on the guitar track.

Having the vocals tweak the other instruments’ eq/filtering seems more subtle than simply ‘riding’ the volume of the competing track(s) (which is what i used to do with the follower, in order to clear sonic space for the vox).

While the ‘ducking’ or ‘boosting’ or ‘pumping’ aspects of the signal follower are very cool; one of my favorites has to be connecting the follower into a vsti’s arp speed control.

Anyway, there are a lot of great ideas here.

47

Do you know if there is something like the Renoise Signal Follower but as hardware effect-processor out there?

cheerio to all!! :slight_smile: