Spectral Freeze

Captures a snapshot of the input's frequency spectrum and sustains it indefinitely — turning any passing sound into a frozen wash, drone, or cloud. Feed it a voice, a chord, or a noisy texture and it holds that exact harmonic moment until you ask for a new one.

How it works

The module runs the incoming audio through an FFT, snapshots the magnitude of every frequency bin at a trigger moment, then continuously resynthesizes that held spectrum. With Shim at zero the per-bin phases advance coherently, so you hear a clean, sustained tone of the captured instant. As Shim rises, the phases are randomized on every hop, smearing the freeze into a diffuse, shimmering cloud. Both channels run their own independent spectral pipeline, so a shimmered freeze spreads into a genuinely wide stereo wash rather than a mirrored mono.

Controls

  • Cap — how often it grabs a fresh snapshot, from 0.25 to 4 beats, synced to the clock input. Short intervals give stuttery re-freezes that track the source; long intervals let one captured moment hang and linger.
  • Shim — phase randomization, 0–100%. At zero you get a steady sustained tone; push it up for a cloudy, breathing shimmer that also widens the stereo image.
  • Mix — dry/wet blend. Fully up is pure freeze; ease it back to layer the held spectrum underneath the live, moving input.
  • Clock — where the tempo comes from. Ext measures the pulses arriving at the clock input, which is how this module has always worked. Song follows the timeline's tempo directly, with no cable at all. Int runs at its own speed, set by the BPM field beside it. One thing worth knowing: in Ext the divisions are relative to whatever you clock it with, so feeding it sixteenths makes every label four times faster than it reads. In Int and Song the module knows what a quarter note is, so the labels mean exactly what they say.
  • BPM — the tempo for Int. In Song it greys out and shows you the timeline's tempo instead; in Ext it greys out too, because the cable is in charge.

Inputs & outputs

  • In L / In R — the stereo audio to freeze; patch the source whose spectrum you want to hold.
  • Cap / Shim / Mix CV — voltage control over each knob; patch an LFO or envelope to sweep the recapture interval, swell the shimmer, or fade the freeze in and out hands-free.
  • Clock — a quarter-note clock that sets the beat grid for Cap's auto-recapture while the Clock control is on Ext; unpatched, it sits at 120 BPM.
  • Reset — a rising edge forces an immediate re-capture, grabbing the spectrum right now.
  • Out L / Out R — the resynthesized stereo wash.

Tips

  • To freeze one perfect moment, set Cap long and trigger Reset by ear the instant you hear something worth holding — it then rings on as a drone.
  • Crank Shim for evolving ambient pads; the stereo decorrelation makes wide, immersive textures from a mono source.
  • Patch a clock and dial Cap short for rhythmic re-freezes that chase the incoming audio in time.