A stereo effect chain with six slots you can drag into any order: Filter, Dynamics, Drive, Delay, Modulation and Reverb. Pick an effect in each card, switch on the ones you want, and hear how the order changes the sound.
The idea
The same effects in a different order make a different sound. Drive into a delay gives clean repeats of a dirty signal; a delay into drive distorts the echoes too. Filtering before distortion is not the same as filtering after it. Multifx makes that easy to hear: drag a card by its header to a new position and the chain follows, while every knob keeps its settings and MIDI assignments.
Many of the factory presets come in pairs that use the same effects in opposite orders, such as Tone Shape into Delay and Delay into Tone Shape, so you can switch between them and compare.
What each card offers
Every card chooses one effect from its family, sixty in all, including:
- Filter: low-, high- and band-pass, notch, four-band and parametric EQ, envelope and LFO filters, and a comb filter.
- Dynamics: compressors, gates, an expander, a transient shaper and a de-esser.
- Drive: overdrives, a triode stage, saturation, clipping, rectifying, wavefolding, bitcrushing, decimation and an octave divider, plus textures such as record crackle, dust and mains hum.
- Delay: simple, ping-pong, cross-feed, saturated, multitap and reverse delays.
- Modulation: chorus, phaser, flanger, tremolo, vibrato, auto-panner, ring modulator, frequency and pitch shifters, rotary speaker, stereo width and Haas widening, and mid/side tools.
- Reverb: Schroeder and Dattorro reverbs, rooms, a hall and a spring.
Each card has up to four controls chosen for that effect and its own Mix knob; More opens extra settings where an effect has them. Choosing an effect switches its slot on, and the card's switch turns it off again. The header holds the overall Mix, the output level and a power switch for the whole chain.
Getting started
Multifx is a stereo audio effect: play a guitar take, a recording or a microphone through it. Start from Clean, where every slot is off, and switch on one card at a time. Or load a preset pair such as Overdrive into Saturated Delay and Saturated Delay into Overdrive and flip between them. Six Family Motion Chain uses all six cards at once.
The crackle, dust and hum textures add their own sound, so they are audible even when nothing is playing. They are stylized effects, not models of a particular record player or circuit.
