 Welcome to the other side. The married side. Hey, it's Anfa and you're watching AnfaVlog. Today I want to show you a new open source distortion plugin for Linux called Wolf Shaper. It's a pretty simple but very powerful processor that lets you crush your sounds with custom designed distortion functions. It has a neat graphical user interface where you can create all sorts of interesting curves. I'm using that one constantly since I was told it exists but it's not widely known yet so I've decided to spread the word with this video. Wolf Shaper is being developed by Patrick Desolnier who have contacted me in May 2018 saying that he's making a wave shaping plugin based on Fruity Wave Shaper by Image Line. I was super happy to hear that because there's still nothing like Wolf Shaper in the open source music production ecosystem. There is a built-in wave shaper plugin in LMS but it's not as flexible as Wolf Shaper and it's not available outside of LMS. There's also kind of a wave shaper plugin in the ALSA modular synth system but again it's only available inside of that system. I've been testing the plugin and providing Patrick with feedback and suggestions for improvements. Enough introduction, let's begin. To install Wolf Shaper you can go to the project's GitHub page and download some binaries or even better install a PPA repository if you're running a Ubuntu-based Linux distribution. The plugin is available for Linux in LV2, DSSI, VST2 and standalone formats. Starting from version 0.1.5 there's also a Windows VST download available. For the purpose of understanding what Wolf Shaper exactly does we're gonna work with sine waves. However first let's talk about the user interface shall we? Alright so here is my Ardor 5.12 session. I have a track with a Zinfusion instance playing a nice consistent sine wave with no velocity sensing so it's easier for us to understand what's going on. After that I have the Wolf Shaper inserted which is right here as you can see when I play it affects the sound I'm gonna reset the curve and after that we have the simple scope plugin which is a very nice oscilloscope by Robin Garias. Alright so the main area of the Wolf Shaper user interface is the canvas where you can create your function. So with the left mouse button you can move around points. You can also move the center points to change the shape of any curve segment. With the right click you can add new points that you can then move around with the left click. Left click and drag. If you right click on the left point of a curve segment you can open up a context menu and you can do various things like delete a point or you can change the type of the curve segment. There are four types. There is a single power which is the default one and it looks like this. There is the double power which is basically the same thing however doubled and mirrored. There is a stairs function that creates a staircase which is useful for decimation effects like bit reduction and there is wave which actually has two modes. It depends if you drag the curve up or down so when you go down you have a sine wave function and the more you drag the more cyclos you fit in but if you drug it up you have a diode processed sine wave so and you can also make it as dense as you want so that's the basic functions. At any point in time you can also easily reset your curve to the basic one and just make sure you do it when you really want it because there is no undo. If you want to reset the parameters of the plugin however like this and this and this you can just use this reset in Ardor and that's gonna make this all go to default. When the sound comes in Wolf Shaper will show a vertical line to indicate the input peak level so we can tell how much you're saturating your function. I've made the Zinnet sub effects as loud as possible without clipping so we can saturate the curve quite a bit. However you can correct for that with the pre knob which stands for pre gain so when I play a note you can make this louder or quieter. However this pre gain control is somewhat limited so you might want to increase the volume of your instrument with a different plugin maybe a compressor or maybe just crank it up in the instrument in the synthesizer itself if you don't have enough room to do it here. Speaking of the knobs we have two more and the next is at the end let's call it the green knob is the post gain which basically changes the volume but after the wave shaping occurs basically if you make your sound too loud you can turn it back down with this. Let's reset reset and reset. The third knob in between the blue one is the wet. The name stands for dry wet ratio so basically if I make my function create square waves right now I'm gonna turn down the post gain. The dry wet control will mix the output between the original wave shaped sound and the distorted one. So basically you can blend together the original sound which is called dry and the processed sound which is called wet hence dry wet. Let's reset. There's an over sampling function that will increase the internal sampling rate of the plugin to avoid unwanted aliasing distortion. I never found myself in a need to use it so for sure it can make wolf shaper a CPU hog. As you can see it changes how the waveform is done however I will leave this entirely to your taste if you think it sounds smoother with over sampling go use it but I think that over sample function is still pretty CPU hungry it's not considered super stable. Speaking of unstable features wolf shaper has two modes of operation the basic mode is the unipolar mode which basically is the symmetric mode in that mode the bottom left corner is the zero and the top right corner is the one and this is applied symmetrically both to the positive and the negative parts of our signal. Let me show you. You see the top and the bottom are perfectly symmetric this is what is called unipolar mode if I switch to bipolar mode you see that the waveform is not symmetric anymore and the actual center of our of our curve is not in the bottom left corner it's right here in the center of the graph if I move this here we can see easier what's going on you can see I can distort just the bottom part of the waveform you see the bottom is a square like but the top is still the sine wave this is very useful and can be extremely fun especially in sound design related to the unipolar bipolar mode there is this center button when enabled and it's enabled by default for good reason it will try to remove any possible DC offset that has come around when we create a curve that's center is not really in the center if you know what I mean well basically if this is here we have DC offset and you can hear the clicks happening as I do this there is static current flowing but there is no signal I have personally found that disabling the center and playing around with the bipolar mode can sometimes be problematic that's why I said this is unstable the unipolar mode I consider it to be perfectly stable I can mess around with this all day and doesn't crash or nothing when I switch to bipolar mode things can go haywire I mean it crashed harder only once for me but many times it produced the normals or nans or some other crazy stuff that made the whole session just unoperatable I had to reload just go to recent and reload my session in order to be able to continue my work so it's not a deal breaker but it can be a bit inconvenient at times but well this software is not in stable version yet so things are gonna improve we're almost done covering all the features there is just one thing left actually two things it's these two knobs and switches these are real-time modifiers that will distort our curve according to some functions we have two types and each type has three variants so we have the type bend and skew each one in three variants so we have bend plus bend minus and bend plus minus also we have skew plus skew minus and skew plus minus let's start with the bend plus which is the first one you can see it brings the points together towards the center from the edges now minus it just works in the opposite direction it spreads them outwards from the center and bend plus minus can go outward or inward now let's go to skew skew will push the points towards one of the sides skew plus we'll do it for the right skew minus we'll do it for the left and skew plus minus we'll do it left or right and the neutral is the middle position now there are two knobs and two switches so one is for the horizontal axes and the other one is for the vertical axes so basically you can have two of these one on the vertical and one on the horizontal axes and you can and you can play around with them and automate this and make all kinds of weird stuff or just use them to tweak your curve until it sounds great that's all the features in the next wolf shaper video i'm going to show you how to use wolf shaper in a real track actually i have the track right here i have a track right here that i made specifically for the short video series about wolf shaper and i'm going to show you how you can use this uh the wolf shaper plugin to enhance the sounds that we have in the track the drums the bass the leads everything special effects we're gonna use wolf shaper as a tool for mixing we're gonna make these sounds more interesting more crisp and in the third video i'm gonna use wolf shaper to design absolutely new sounds like we did here with sine waves maybe possibly using some other tools some other effects to have many different interesting things going on so stay tuned and if you like this video leave it a like if you have any questions or suggestions for the future videos please leave them in the comments i'm reading all of that and i'm considering your ideas in my next videos so the next video will be about wolf shaper the next next video will be about wolf shaper but i might maybe actually interleave some other topics to not get bored so i'm gonna try to make shorter but more defined videos yeah and i want to give big thanks to all the patreon supporters at patreon.com slash anfa who are enabling me to dedicate more time to making videos like this one unless to do any other work i have a full-time job as a graphic designer currently but hopefully with your support with the support of the community one day discs may become my full-time job or at least half-time job that would be awesome anyway so if you want to see more and better more frequent videos from me consider becoming a patreon supporter so that's all for today thanks for watching and i will see you in the next video bye