I’ve had the AH for about a year and spent many hours exploring. Read the manual a few times start to finish. Love the sound on my mixes. But for some reason - until today - I did not realize that the filter can be used to direct the frequency destruction to specified ranges using the available filter shapes and wet/dry mixing.
This is not an obvious advertised feature for the unit. I thought that the filter was just another sound shaping capability to be combined in sequence with all the other capabilities. I’ve enjoyed the Clean Boost and Saturation circuits for their sound enhancement on hard electronic drums and mostly shied away from the other circuits which always seemed too loud or ear fatiguing.
With the filter control and dry/wet effect mixing, even the High Gain circuit can be subtle - okay maybe not that one but you get the point. This is what I found today. And the LFO can sweep that filter frequency - and that modulation can also be subtle or extreme, fast or slow. Conceivably this could be used to ‘drift’ harmonics over the most serene ambient mixes.
Excited to discover… and I can’t imagine how I’ll ever get to the depths of it. 100% keeper and recommended to anyone else that’s contemplating the purchase. Cheers all.
It’s a powerful feature. Thavius Beck goes over this in the parallel processing bit on the Ask Video AH course.
Effecting midrange range, adding top end sheen to a mix, or pinging the filter to get tones are things that AH does well beyond heating up the two-mix.
Oh stop it.
I’d already put Heat on the not for me/ don’t really need one pile.
But on a serious note the main reason was I’m not that into the distortion type of effect (although I just got RYTM and I’m liking the overdrive). I demo’ed one in a noisy store with headphones and wasn’t impressed.
All Synths need distortion, reverb and delay. I find that I didn’t really understand what I could do with the Heat at first… thus over looked it a little… but now that I know what i can do with it and cool little things that make my production sound better… well I’m sold on it!
I think the biggest issue is that no one really understands how to use it in their production. It just sits there on 1 nob but you can do a bunch of great things with it by sending midi to it.
Distortion aside, I think the AH makes a great stereo filter box with all kinds of envelope following possibilities. I’ve attempted to make leslie speakers and phasers with great success.
I’m not on this forum much. Thought to check this thread I started the other day. My post was full of enthusiasm but lacking technical detail. Anyway thanks to those that responded politely.
Study this diagram for a moment and perhaps appreciate the control it offers to a sound designer. As always, Elektron gives us the widest range of sound shaping options and studio integration possibilities.
Analog Heat slams a drum submix no doubt - but there are many control points on the circuit that make it an incredibly nuanced device. Regardless of the circuit that you choose, there is infinite variety to explore on source material.
Wet level
Dry/Wet mix
drive
filter drive (dirt)
filter shape, freq and res
Also - it never occurred to me to try dry/wet mixing of a filtered parallel signal before. Closest I came to this sort of novelty is on the Access Virus with its serial/parallel filter modes.
These are precisely the things people who havent used the heat miss about this unit. Its not just a distortion + filter box, Its a unique tool, capable of many tasks.
Thanks for reminding about this kind of things! Still plenty to discover
The A4 can be used as a massive 8x monofilterbank plus 4x overdrive circuits, when you use the neighbour tracks. More powerfull than the Analog Heat in that register.
I’d like to know more as well - you just input a mono signal into a voice, and use a neighbor osc mode for the next voice? And do the same for the other mono chhannel to get stereo?
High pass distortion on the drum buss is nice for adding crunch or glue to cymbals and hihats.
