Here’s a surprise, an evidently spontaneous drop from Ableton co-founder Robert Henke in Max for Live. Filter Delays provides three filtered stereo delays with some very clever twists; it’s a free download for Ableton Live Suite 12+ users.
Robert says he developed this for his own work, but it’s a free-as-in-beer download for the rest of us. And it’s got some really smart touches in there, including highlights like:
- a time multiplier across all three delays (and global time shift)
- panned inputs
- feedback routing options: individual, summed, etc.
- channel swap
That in addition to proper stereo plugin makes this a natural upgrade to the original, mono-only Filter Delay Robert built for version 1 of Live. The additional delay time controls and routing options simply aren’t possible with the original delay.
Here’s a bit of what it can sound like, with a spontaneous patch in the new Waldorf Attack drum machine:
Download, with the usual detailed documentation and notes:
https://www.roberthenke.com/technology/filterdelays.html
The download is contained on Robert’s page at the top. If you initially had trouble downloading, he updated the link to secure https so it will no longer be blocked; it’s also been updated to version 1.03.
For end users, this is a nice way to quickly revisit the original Live Filter Delay. It’s fascinating to me to revisit these designs, all of them originally created by Robert, that we now take for granted — designs that shipped with version 1 and remained essentially unchanged since then. That’s in keeping with the official Ableton remake of Erosion, which I wrote about last week:
For developers-patchers-tinkerers, opening it up reveals an elegant, economical design. It’s actually a great demonstration that while the lower-level gen~ environment may sound scary, it can actually take less work to express something in gen~ than with the usual patches. (I do still wish Pd had something like gen~ in it!)
Enjoy! And if this inspires you to get back to patching, as well — I sure felt that way — you might consider if CDM’s guide on the topic is helpful: