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2. Melodic breakbeats with Tone2 Warmverb

1 Let’s dive in and put Warmverb to the test by morphing a crusty DnB breakbeat into a robotic melody. Set your DAW’s BPM to 168 before dragging Drum Break.wav (from Tutorial Files) onto a new audio track. Insert Warmverb on this channel, then strap D16 Group Frontier and Barricade CM (both from Plugins) across your project’s master output to increase loudness and prevent clipping. 2 To get an instant feel for Warmverb’s capabilities, have a browse through the plugin’s mammoth selection of factory presets: head to the top Browser section and click the dropdown menu to select a preset from the categorised list, or click on the up and down arrows to cycle through them one-by-one. Once you’re done, punch the Browser section’s Init button to initialise the plugin. 3 Warmverb’s main centre section holds a quartet of identical effects slots, so you can stack up to four of the 31 available effects at once. Click a slot’s Type menu or use the arrows to load an effect; choose from reverbs, delays, distortion, modulation, spatial and creative effects. Each slot houses empty ‘macros’ that are automatically populated by up to four of your chosen effect’s available parameters. 4 Let’s first apply Akai-style metallic pitchshifting to our breakbeat: in the Effect 1 section, select Pitch Shifter from the Type menu, then crank the Tune knob fully clockwise to transpose the beat up an octave. In the second slot, change Type to Vocoder, set Formant to -50%, Wave to Saw, Tune to B3 and Chord to Minor to set up Warmverb’s internal carrier oscillator. 5 Warmverb houses a multitude of analogue and digital distortion types. Let’s use a digital one to add extra fuzz. In Effect slot 3, change the effect Type to Bitcrush, with Drive at 42% and Postamp at 49%. All four slots feature a Mix knob for blending the dry and processed signals – set slot 3’s Mix amount to around 50/50 (12 o’clock) for more subdued crunch. 6 If you want to ‘A/B’ your processing, toggle a slot’s Bypass button to disable that effect. This proves useful when dialling in multiple effects and settings. As three effects slots are now in use, we suddenly hear all three effects slots’ outputs in parallel – but this can be changed via the Routing switch…