Roar

A signal fed into Roar can go through three different stages of processing, coming across a variety of stackable saturation curves and filters before hitting feedback and compression. The architecture of the device is geared towards flexible routing and modulation, bringing new levels of movement and expression to your sound for musical results as well as technical ones. With a variety of non-linear shaper curves and filters, Roar can produce sounds unlike any other instrument or effect currently available in Live.

Drive, tone and routing modes

Roar’s Drive knob sets the level of the signal being input into Roar before the gain stages, and can be used to quickly add or remove distortion. Adjusting Roar’s Tone parameters has noticeable effects on the timbre of its gain stages; dialing in positive values with the Tone Amount knob can help attenuate low-frequency content in guitars or basses, for example, to avoid muddy sounds when using large amounts of distortion. When active, the Color Compensation toggle attenuates tone values before the shaper and boosts them after it, giving you more control over the gain stage processing. 

Choose from six routing types: Single, Serial, Parallel, Multi Band, Mid Side, and Feedback. Apart from Single and Multi Band modes, each routing mode has a Blend control that allows you to control the blend between its two gain stages.

Serial mode processes the input signal using two shapers, one after the other, while Parallel mode processes the input signal using two independent shapers.

Multi Band mode splits the frequency spectrum into three bands (Low, Mid and High) that can each be processed independently. Two Crossover Filters (Low and High) let you define the crossover frequency between the three bands. This mode serves a variety of applications, including drum processing and adding saturation to entire mixes.

Mid Side mode processes the input signal’s mono and stereo signals independently. This mode is useful for enhancing a signal’s stereo image without compromising the sound of the signal at the center of the stereo field.

Feedback mode processes the input signal and its feedback independently, which can create unusual tones or transform Roar into a distinctive delay. Try modulating Roar’s Shaper Amount with an envelope to produce saturation that has a shuffled delay effect, for example, or subtly offsetting Shaper Bias to create delays that degrade over time.

Staging and shaping

Each routing mode has its own set of gain stages, which can be turned on or off independently. Gain Stage tabs all have the same three controls: Shaper Amount, Shaper Bias, and Filter Frequency. Twelve Shaper Types and eight Filter Types can be selected from their corresponding drop-down menus at the bottom of each Gain Stage tab.

The Shaper Type drop-down menu under the Shaper Visualization display has twelve curves to choose from. Shapers can also be turned on or off via the toggle at the bottom of the Shaper Visualization display.

Modulation

Roar gives you four modulation sources to choose from: LFO 1, LFO 2, Env, and Noise.
Each LFO has five waveforms, each of which can be set to Free, Synced, Triplet, Dotted, or Sixteenth rates using the Mode drop-down menu. Rate speed can be set in Hertz or tempo-synced and can be modified by clicking and dragging a given rate up or down. 

The Env tab’s envelope follower generates a modulation signal based on Roar’s input signal. Attack, Release, Threshold, Gain, Frequency, and Width controls let you hone in on the element you’d like to isolate, even in busy sound sources. When activated, the Envelope Input Listen toggle plays back the input signal only. Note that the Envelope Follower’s filter only affects what the envelope reacts to, not Roar’s output signal.

The Envelope Follower is particularly useful as a modulation source in Roar’s Modulation Matrix. Try setting it to follow a snare sound in a drum loop, for example, and have it modulate Roar’s Dry/Wet balance or its Shaper Amount each time the snare hits.

The Noise modulation source includes four different noise types: Simplex, Wander, S & H, and Brown. Noise curves can be set in Hertz or tempo-synced and can be smoothed like Roar’s LFO curves.

The Matrix tab lets you assign modulation sources to modulation targets within the device. Clicking a parameter while the Matrix tab is open will set it as a modulation target. Modulation sources are listed horizontally and modulation targets are listed vertically. Click and drag a cell up or down to apply modulation between parameters.

Feedback

The Feedback section is one of Roar’s most distinctive features. Feeding Roar’s signal back into itself can add a new layer of ringing, otherworldly tones and textures to your sound.
Choose between five feedback modes: Time, Synced, Triplet, Dotted, and Note. Synced and Time modes let you use Roar’s Feedback as a delay, while Note mode lets you set the feedback’s ring to a specific pitch. The Feedback Amount knob sets the amount of signal being fed back into Roar’s input. Because a compressor is present in Roar’s feedback loop, loud signals will temporarily attenuate the amount of feedback being generated as gain reduction is applied by the compressor.

Global controls

The Compression Amount knob sets the amount of compression being applied to the output signal, and thereby to the signal being fed back into Roar. When the Compressor Sidechain HP Filter toggle is turned on, a high-pass filter is applied to the analysis signal used by the compressor’s sidechain. This is useful for lowering the amount of gain reduction generated by the compressor’s response to low frequency signals. The Output Gain knob sets the level of the wet signal being output, which is followed by a hard clipping stage and then fed into the Dry/Wet stage. This parameter is useful for compensating level changes produced by the Drive or Shaper Amount knobs.