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2. Melodic breakbeats with Tone2 Warmverb

7 In the bottom-centre Routing panel, you can flip between two signal flows. Routing A outputs Slot 1 in parallel to both slots 2 and 3, which recombine into slot 4. Routing B routes all the effects in series, so that the output of our Pitch Shifter is now routed directly to the Vocoder for a more obvious ‘robot break’. 8 Adjacent to Warmverb’s Browser is a three-band Equaliser (with low- and high-shelves, plus a midrange bell curve). Set all three to roughly 2 o’clock to broadly enhance our singing beat’s tone. You can Ctrl/Cmd-click a knob to reset it back to its default position, or Shift-drag to adjust a parameter in finer increments. 9 Now for some silky virtual ambience, courtesy of one of Warmverb’s gorgeous reverbs: in the fourth and final effects slot, change Type to Reverb Ultra, then set Mix to 9 o’clock, Size to 15.0m and Predelay to 0.00s. Beautiful! 10 To change the pitch of the Vocoder in slot 3, you can always adjust the Vocoder’s Tune knob – but it’s more fun to simply hammer notes on your MIDI keyboard. Create a MIDI track in your DAW, route its output into Warmverb’s MIDI input, then play MIDI notes to change the Vocoder’s Tune amount on the fly. 11 The bottom-left Feedback section lets you feed some of the processed signal back in the chain, and tempo-sync it via the Delay dropdown. This effect is easier heard than discussed: crank up Feedback as you change pitch via MIDI to create screaming, tuned tones. Keep the Clip button lit up to prevent the squealing feedback from building up too much. 12 To finish, we’ll round up the rest of the features we haven’t covered: the topright Mix panel houses Volume, Mix and Bypass parameters for global control; while the Browser features buttons for preset/bank: Save, Load, Copy, Paste, Random and Reset. If you’re stuck for inspiration, punch Random until you stumble across a setup you like!