Draw the shape, hear it on the beat.
Shapeau is an effects rack you draw. Every effect in it is driven by a shape — a line you draw across one bar, one beat or one sixteenth — and every shape runs locked to your host’s tempo. Draw a dip and you have sidechain ducking without a sidechain. Draw a slope and you have a filter sweep. Draw a few steps and the distortion only bites on the hits.
The input is split into three frequency bands, and every effect has its own shape in each of them. Duck the bass under the kick and leave the hats alone, chop the mids into a trance gate while the lows keep rolling, widen the top of a bassline and keep its bottom in the middle.
What you draw is drawn over what you hear. Behind every shape, Shapeau shows the audio passing through it, in time with the shape: what goes in, what comes out, where the playhead is, and what the effect really did once its smoothing has rounded off the corners. A duck lands on the kick it is ducking for because you can see the kick.
Seven effects — volume, filter, drive, crush, time, width and pan — go into a chain in any order you like. A filter before a stutter is a different sound from a stutter before a filter, and changing one into the other is one drag.
- Volume, filter, drive, crush, time (stutters, holds and reverse), width and pan, chained in any order, each one switched on, bypassed or taken out with one click
- A shape per effect and per band, with soft and hard corners, bendable curves, a step editor and twelve starting shapes
- Every shape locked to the beat, from a thirty-second note to four bars, with its own phase
- The audio drawn behind the shape as it plays: input, output, playhead and the modulation you actually hear
- Three bands that sum back to what went in, so a flat shape leaves the sound as it was
- Presets that carry every shape, and appear in your host’s own preset browser
- No latency
Free. CLAP and VST3, for Linux and Windows.