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Fathoms faceplate in Studies
Studies

Fathoms

Spectral Ambient Processor

Part of Studies

A subscription opens all of Studies, in two plugins (Studies Effects and Studies Instruments), with new devices as we release them.

Subscribe · $9/mo Download Studies free

10 devices are free.

Or own the plugin

Price: $20

The original plugin with its own interface, as a one-time purchase.

 See the standalone interface

Description

Fathoms is an ambient processor that can turn anything into glacial ambience, a harmonic drone or an endless pitch-shifted space.

It spectrally processes incoming audio and routes it through a resonating, physically modeled room. Before the spectral stage your sound swells through a feedback delay, and in it you can pitch shift the sound, sweep it or freeze it. A high-pass and a Moog-style low-pass shape the tone at the end. You can go deep into sound design with Fathoms, or simply use it as a reverb with a slow swell running through it.

Fathoms in the Handbook

Signal path

The swell tremolo moves the level of your input up and down, and the feedback delay holds it for up to three seconds before the spectral stage. There the sound is pitch shifted, swept or frozen. A little of each side is mixed into the other, and both sides go into the modeled room together. The room's stereo output passes through the DEEP high-pass and the SHALLOW low-pass, and BLEND mixes the result with your dry sound. Only the processed sound goes through the delay, so with SWELL turned up it arrives up to three seconds after the dry signal.

  1. Vector sweep

    VECTOR
    Sets the speed of the pitch sweep, from one cycle every 1,000 seconds up to one a second. You only hear it when MODE is on UP or DOWN.
    MODE
    Has three positions. OFF, fully left, holds the shift at the PITCH setting. UP, in the middle, glides the spectrum from the very bottom up to the PITCH setting and then starts again. DOWN, fully right, glides it from the PITCH setting down to the bottom.

  2. Swell tremolo

    SWELL
    Sets the speed of a swell that pushes your input between silence and double its level, up to about once a second. A random offset that changes every second keeps the swells uneven, and they keep going slowly even at zero. The same knob sets the delay time, from none up to three seconds, so faster swells come with longer echoes.

  3. Feedback delay

    FEEDBACK
    Sets how much of each echo is fed back into the delay. At its lowest you hear a single echo, and fully up each repeat is half as loud as the one before.

  4. Spectral shift

    PITCH
    Shifts the delayed sound in the spectral domain, from an octave down to an octave up. At noon the pitch is unchanged.
    FREEZE
    Turn it past halfway to freeze the current spectrum into a sustained drone, and back below halfway to let go. The freeze holds the sound after the shift, so PITCH and the sweep leave the held sound alone, while the room and the filters keep working on it.

  5. Dimension room

    DIMENSION
    Sets the size of the physically modeled room, from a tiny box up to a space about 15 meters long.

  6. Tone filter

    DEEP
    Sets the cutoff of a high-pass filter that clears low end out of the processed sound, from 20 to 500 Hz.
    SHALLOW
    Sets the cutoff of a Moog-style ladder low-pass that softens the top of the processed sound, from 5 kHz to 10 kHz.

  7. Master

    BLEND
    Sets the mix between your dry input and the processed sound.
    GAIN
    Sets the output level, from silent up to double. Noon is unity.

Try thisFind a texture you like and turn FREEZE past halfway to hold it. Then shape the drone with DIMENSION and SHALLOW, and bring your live signal back in on top with BLEND.

Demo
This video shows the standalone plugin.
Good to know

In Studies

Fathoms is in Studies Effects, under Pitch & Time, Spatial and Spectral.

Standalone

The standalone plugin, shown further down the page, picks OFF, UP or DOWN from a menu, freezes with a FREEZE / RESUME button and calls GAIN OUTPUT. In Studies we made MODE and FREEZE knobs.

Bundle

The standalone plugin is also part of the Ambient Suite, Cinematic Shadows, the Spectral Suite and The Textural Dimension.

Formats
Studies: Audio Units, VST2 and VST3 on Mac, VST3 on Windows · Apple silicon native
Systems
Current macOS and Windows 10/11 x64
Fathoms | Spectral Ambient Processor

Standalone version

The original plugin with its own interface, as a one-time purchase.

AU · VST2 · VST3 · macOS · Windows