Uploaded January 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
This is one of those ideas I generate when I'm trying to fall asleep but my mind is still racing around, haha! I basically figured out if you sync a bunch of slow-moving LFOs together with an equally spaced phase difference between them, you can create the basic foundation of a shepard tone patch! There are two sets of LFOs each controlling an important element: The first set of sawtooth LFOs controls the falling pitch of each oscillator, and the second set of sine LFOs control the volume of each oscillator (it is important that this sine LFO begins at zero when the sawtooth LFO jumps back to the top of its cycle). It's actually rather simple once you understand how everything needs to be set up! After that you can play around with how many voices you want to implement (here I used four), what the pitch range of the falling voices occupies, the tuning of each voice, etc. To help with blending each voice in and out even further, I threw some lengthy reverb at the end of the audio path.
This is one of those ideas I generate when I'm trying to fall asleep but my mind is still racing around, haha! I basically figured out if you sync a bunch of slow-moving LFOs together with an equally spaced phase difference between them, you can create the basic foundation of a shepard tone patch! There are two sets of LFOs each controlling an important element: The first set of sawtooth LFOs controls the falling pitch of each oscillator, and the second set of sine LFOs control the volume of each oscillator (it is important that this sine LFO begins at zero when the sawtooth LFO jumps back to the top of its cycle). It's actually rather simple once you understand how everything needs to be set up! After that you can play around with how many voices you want to implement (here I used four), what the pitch range of the falling voices occupies, the tuning of each voice, etc. To help with blending each voice in and out even further, I threw some lengthy reverb at the end of the audio path.
