Electronic musician and Ableton Live co-creator Robert Henke has shared a free Max for Live device that puts a stereo spin on Live's existing Filter Delay device and adds some nifty feedback routing.
Filter Delay features three stereo delay lines, each of which can be set to 16th-notes, dotted 16ths, 16th triplets, or 32nd-notes – this value can then be multiplied by up to 32 using the adjacent Time control, producing delay times of up to 2 bars in length. A Global Delay Time control on the left-hand side adjusts all three delay lines simultaneously.
Each delay runs through a band-pass filter, with controls for centre Frequency and Width joined by a Global Frequency control that can be used to modulate the filters across all three delays at once. Alongside the typical feedback routing you'd find in a standard delay, you're also given the option to combine all the outputs and feed them back into all the inputs, if you're feeling particularly chaotic.
Alongside the feedback routing, Filter Delays introduces some interesting stereo capabilities absent from the OG Filter Delay. The Pan control dials in panning before the signal hits each delay's input – and between the values of 50 and -50, that's all it does.
Once you push it beyond those values towards 99 and -99, though, the Pan control folds back a polarity-flipped version of the signal into the other channel, and dialled up to the maximum, this means the signal is centrally panned but out of phase across both channels. This can be used to produce some creative stereo effects, especially when combined with the Channel Swap control, which switches the left and right output of each delay line.
"I wrote the original Filter Delay for Live 1, released in 2001," Henke writes on his website. "Recently, I rediscovered it and wanted to add a few more options that were missing in the Ableton device. This led me to create a new version in Max4Live.
"The Ableton Filter Delay was one of the first devices I developed, partly inspired by the filtered delays in my Lexicon PCM 80. Back then, CPU limitations were a major concern, so the original effect only includes three mono delays and less flexible feedback routing."
Whether you're someone that uses Filter Delay on a regular basis, or relies on the recently updated Delay device instead, we see no good reason not to download this updated version of a classic Live effect. You'll need either Ableton Live Suite or the Max for Live add-on with Standard to run Filter Delays. Henke says it's only been tested with Live Suite 12, but it may work with earlier versions.
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