5
I N T R O
(the one that comes before the sequel!)
About Crystallizer
Crystallizer is the third in a series of totally cool new plug-ins to come out of the
SoundToys (formerly Wave Mechanics) plug-in development lab. As with FilterFreak,
our Analog Filtering module and PhaseMistress, our killer analog phase shifter, a truly
ridiculous amount of programming time, head scratching, listening and tweaking has
gone into the development and design of Crystallizer in order to provide you with an
incredibly creative, powerful, new granular-pitch-splice-forward-backward-echo-plus-
space-drive-shimmer-accumulator-effect-device for your Pro Tools rig. That makes
sense, right? However, one of the most difficult things facing us is how to describe
what Crystallizer does. It is a special tool and sounds unlike anything else so a little
history may be in order.
A bunch of years ago the brains at our company (Sound Toys in case you did not
know) worked for a little company called Eventide in the swamps of New Jersey (yes,
there are swamps). While there, these geniuses created the H-3000 Harmonizer®
which also contained a new algorithm called Reverse Shift. That algorithm sat around
kind of unused for a little while until this sound designer by the name of Andrew
Schlesinger (yours truly) realized that by using the algorithm with a lot of feedback
and delay that you could create these incredible "Crystal-Like" echoes and shimmer-
ing effects that sounded absolutely incredible, especially on guitar. So a preset was
created called "Crystal Echoes" which has subsequently been used by hundreds of
artists and producers on tons of albums.
Fast-forward to 2004 and you now have an updated and more powerful Pro Tools
plug-in device created by the same guys and based around the same concept (but
with a lot more capabilities). And what does it do? Crystallizer basically grabs a
"slice" of stereo or mono audio coming in from it’s input and plays it back either for-
ward or in reverse with the ability to shift the pitch of the audio slice (4) octaves up,
or (4) octaves down. It also includes the ability to delay the playback of the audio by
up to (2) seconds and most importantly use regeneration or "Recycle" to feed the
output back into the input allowing you to create some radical and beautiful effects
on all sorts of input signals. We have also thrown in our standard fare of "Tweak"
parameters to further mutate the signal, but that will be covered a bit later on.
Since Crystallizer is not your standard fare it is a little hard to accurately describe all
the functions (some are clearer than others) and this is one of those devices that
begs to be tweaked and futzed with. There is nothing to break, nothing to ruin and it
won’t stain your carpet so you might as well just start digging in and playing around
to see what this puppy can do.
Summary of Contents for Crystallizer
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