charlotte's echos

charlottesEchos · effects · schema v1

Destructive multi-head stereo delay. Pitch-shifted feedback with decay.

A destructive multi-head stereo delay — a four-stage cascade of echoes that colour and degrade the source rather than repeating it cleanly. Each of the four stages tap the delayed signal in turn; FEEDBACK is fed to every stage so repeats compound across the chain into smeared, endless tails, DECAY progressively tapers each later stage's level and adds in-loop high-frequency loss for a darkening, dub-like decay, and PITCHUP shifts each stage up by a fixed ratio so the cascaded echoes climb in pitch — the classic ascending-shimmer effect. It is the audio sibling of the video-domain VDELAY, and roughly the sound of four COCOA DELAYs stacked in serial. Reach for it when you want the wet path to abuse the signal.

the faceplate

3 inputs · 2 outputs · 5 params

inputs

id	cable	what it does
`L`	audio	Left-channel input feeding the multi-head delay cascade. audio signal; L/R stereo pair with R — L-only auto-duplicates to R
`R`	audio	Right-channel input feeding the cascade. audio signal; L/R stereo pair with L
`delay`	cv	CV that scales the DELAY-time knob (log-scaled), shifting all tap times together — sweep it for tape-warble and pitch-bend smears on the echoes. control voltage (CV); modulates delay (multiplicative ≈ octaves — ±1 CV spans the param’s log range)

outputs

id	cable	what it does
`L`	audio	Left-channel output: the dry signal blended with the four-stage wet cascade per MIX. audio signal; L/R stereo pair with R
`R`	audio	Right-channel output: the dry signal blended with the wet cascade per MIX. audio signal; L/R stereo pair with L

params

id	label	range	default	curve
`delay`	Delay	0.001..1.5s	0.4	log
`feedback`	Fbk	0..1	0.5	linear
`decay`	Decay	0..1	0.2	linear
`pitchUp`	Ptch	0..0.2	0	linear
`mix`	Mix	0..1	0.5	linear

controls

control	what it does
Decay	Per-tap colour-decay (0..1): progressively tapers each later stage's wet level and adds high-frequency loss inside the loop, so the repeats darken and degrade as they fade — the 'destructive', dub-delay character.
Delay	Base tap time in seconds, log-scaled 1 ms..1.5 s — the spacing of the first echo (the cascade stages derive from it). Summed with the DELAY CV input.
Fbk	Feedback amount fed to EVERY stage (0..1). Because it compounds across the four-stage chain, even moderate settings build long tails and high settings smear into near-infinite, self-sustaining echoes.
Mix	Dry / wet balance (0..1): 0 is the clean input, 1 is the cascade only, between crossfades the two.
Ptch	Per-stage upward pitch shift (0..0.2). At 0 the echoes repeat at pitch; above 0 each successive stage is shifted up by a compounding ratio so the cascaded echoes climb in pitch — the signature ascending shimmer. Uses the same interpolation as the delay reads, so pitchUp=0 patches are bit-for-bit unchanged.

source

charlottes-echos.ts on GitHub.