Effector?

An effector is a device that affects sound in some way to change what you hear. For example, the Echo and Reverb knobs of a karaoke machine, which change the sound of your voice to be “richer” and “fuller” when you turn it on, are known as effectors.

While effectors can be categorized in several different ways, Florchestra’s effectors are primarily categorized into two systems: spatial and modulation.

For instance, applying a “spatial” effector transforms the sound to give it a sense of space, such as a room, music hall, etc. On the other hand, a modulator can change the tone of the sound to be deeper, stranger, etc.

Florchestra Effectors Are Attached to Songs

The Florchestra Effectors can only be utilized with Florchestra instruments. These effectors can be attached to compositions and will be used alongside the Florchestra instruments.

You can adjust the effector as you compose a song, and the settings of the effector are saved with the song rather than each instrument. As this is meant to be an easier-to-understand concept, you can’t adjust the effector directly from your Florchestra instrument. To put it simply, you can understand the Florchestra Instrument as an instrument that can be influenced by an effector rather than played with an effector.

Since effectors consume a lot of the Black Spirit’s energy (in other words, it uses a lot of your PC’s CPU), they can’t be unlimited in how they’re used and must be used as efficiently as possible. So, they’ve been set up this way. Due to the limitations of this method, if you’re playing a song with effectors, but another group is playing another song next to you, you’ll hear their sound with the adjustments of the effectors in the song you are playing. Unfortunately, there is no other way to save the Black Spirit’s energy…

Playing with Effectors!

At the top left of the Compose window, there are buttons to set up three effectors. Click them to open the effector’s settings window.

In the middle, there are “Knob” controllers that can be rotated in a circle. You can turn these knobs with your mouse or enter a number below them to adjust their value.

Although the Florchestra instruments are content that is intended for “having fun,” the terms listed in the effectors are the same technical terms used by music and sound professionals. The reason for this is to maintain the already standardized terms, since creating new ones could cause more confusion. As such, let us go over the terms and their usage below.

Reverb is a reverberation sound from how sound reflects when made in an actual room. In a smaller space, this reverberation sound is small and short. You may have heard a larger and louder reverberation sound before if you’ve entered a large room or hall (an empty space without objects in particular).

Time is how you adjust the length of this reverberation sound. Setting it to the minimum value of 0 will let you hear a reverb sound for a space around the size of a classroom. Increasing the Time value will make the room bigger, and raising the value to 100 will make it seem like a massive hall, much larger than an actual hall or church.

Delay causes the same sound to be repeated with a diminishing effect, such as an echo in karaoke or an echo when you shout in a mountain range. This Delay effector has a different feeling than the Reverb effector, which emulates a room. You can imagine delay being a sound echoing across the horizon.

Feedback allows you to adjust the number of times the same sound is repeated. When set to 0, you’ll hear the sound delayed twice. As you increase this value, the number of delayed sounds will also increase. At the maximum value of 100, the sound will be delayed 20 times, becoming smaller and smaller the further back it goes and creating the effect that the sound is echoing far beyond the horizon.

When we originally created the Delay effector, we wanted to make it possible to also adjust its time, but the game’s audio engine limited the ability to adjust the delay in real-time. As a result, we, unfortunately, weren’t able to implement this, but we adjusted the time value to make it as universally appropriate for as many genres as possible.

Chorus is a modulation effector (modulator) that copies several sounds and transforms them to play at the same time. For instance, connecting a Chorus effector while I’m singing would cause my voice to be copied several times and played at the same time. Basically, it makes you feel like you’re playing in a chorus, so the effector is aptly named as such.

Adjusts the number of copied and repeated sounds. If you increase this value to 100, the same sound will be copied a large number of times and played together. However, the same sound overlapped several times at the same time causes the sound to shift in a strange and fun way, sort of like how you sound when you have a cold. This is sometimes called the flange effect.

Truthfully, we originally intended to let you adjust the feedback value way more aggressively, but beginners could adjust this value incorrectly, which could cause them to hear sounds like a jet taking off or someone screaming into a microphone. Thus, we limited the values to the limits of sounds made in nature...

LFO or Low Frequency Oscillator (different from UFO!) is an unseen part of Florchestra instruments, which moves in an up and down oscillating shape. By changing the LFO Depth, you can adjust how much the original sound will be affected by the LFO, altering the sound to be mushier/weaker depending on how you set it. If you were to set LFO Frequency 0 and adjust the LFO Depth to 100, you’d hear a “stickier” and “mushier” sound when you apply the chorus effect pedal on an electric guitar.

▲ Increasing LFO Frequency



▲ Increasing LFO Depth and Frequency to maximum values.