LFO Conversations – The Modulation Trick That Makes Any Sound Come Alive

You might be familiar with the concept of “call and response”. This is when one musical phrase is answered by a second phrase – like a conversation between two sounds. All music uses it, but it's always been about a conversation between instruments. Until I found a preset in ShaperBox that changed the way I think about it, that is…

The preset in question is called ‘SB2 Eat Your Veggies’, and being a ShaperBox 2 preset, you’ll need to activate ‘Show Legacy Presets’ in the main menu to reveal it if you're using ShaperBox 3.

It combines a time-shifted note that gives the "call", and a squelchy filter rhythm that "responds" to it. It's call and response between effects, and I call it an “LFO Conversation”. Taking inspiration from that preset, let’s see how far we can take the idea…

Building an LFO conversation

Start with some woozy chords. For the call, set DriveShaper to a 2-bar cycle and draw a spiky rhythm over the first chord.

Then, for the response, draw a NoiseShaper curve to fade up and down over the second chord.

This gives us a nice contrast: a spiky call, then a flowing response.

Taking it further with multiband

Here's where it gets really interesting: there's a second type of LFO Conversation. In DriveShaper's lower frequency band, draw a curve that mirrors the noise's flow.

This is effectively creating a call and response inside one single effect using multiband. The high band does one thing, the low band answers it.

The finishing touches

To fill the gap right at the end of the two-bar phrase, add a bitcrush sweep…

…then a blast of reverb.

And to bring back that squelch, mix in a wobbly filter rhythm.

Now, with all these back-and-forth effects, you've got a conversation happening right inside one plugin.

The resulting preset – ‘Call and Response’ – is saved in the ShaperBox library. Try it yourself with the free, fully functional ShaperBox demo, and check out my video version of this tutorial on our YouTube channel.