Welcome to version 1.0 of Chip Burwell's Power Transformer. Power Transformer is released as public domain and may be distributed freely. I do ask, that if you distribute it, you include this read me file with it. It provides some basic information and will help avoid difficulties and problems.
What Power Transformer is, and what it does.
Power Transformer is a Sound Designer II Plug In, and must be placed in the "SDII Plug-Ins" folder, which must be in the same folder that Sound Designer is located in. After you have copied the plug in file to this folder, start Sound Designer, open a file, and then under the DSP menu will be an item "Chip Burwell's Power Transformer". If this item isn't there, then you don't have the plug in file in the correct place, or it has been corrupted during the file transferring process.
Assuming you have the menu item, "Chip Burwell's Power Transformer" select it, and a window will come up. At the very top should be a popup menu, listing your open files, a preview button, a process button, a playback button, and a bypass button. There should be a graph under that, with nine sliders underneath, seven default buttons on the right, and in the bottom right an about button. You change the sound by varying the graph. You can vary the graph by sliding the buttons up and down, or you can change the graph by clicking on the default buttons on the right. A straight line will have no effect.
Ok, now what this thing does.... Basically Power Transformer is a non linear amplifier. The curve in the graph controls the amount of amplitude each sample will receive. The x axis can be thought of as the input, and the y axis is the output. Or put more practically, if you set the curve to "balloon" upwards, it will boost all the low volume samples, but not the loud samples. (Similiar to a compressor) On the other hand, if you set the curve to "dip" downwards, it will cause the low volume samples to be decreased, and the high volume samples to increase. Because of the design, Power Transformer should never clip any samples.
Probably the best way to see what it does is to first click on the default buttons, while previewing. Some things to keep in mind. The sharper the corners in your curve the more distortion you will introduce. The left most slider "F1" will normally need to be set to zero. Any deviation from this will cause really obvious distortion. (I demo-ed this plug in for a guy who does a lot of hip hop, and he really liked the distortion that changing the left slider introduced, so hey, if it works for you.......) One of the things that the plug in will do really well, is boost the sound of relatively short samples, such as sound effects. If you have something like a gun shot, or a crash sound, try that, and you will be amazed at how much you can crank that sound up, without any clipping. Good luck. Send comments to:
