I was watching the amazing Imogen Heap (sexy, musical and techy!) recently, when she demo’d a new controller system operated by her body (it’s as intriguing as it sounds!). At one point, she sang a note and captured/froze it to hang on in an amazing cloud of sound. I set about doing this using a reverb in Ableton.

After much trial, error and googling, I found this useful tutorial on creating a “frozen” reverb. I had something similar, but the idea of toggling a wet reverb chain via a button press makes it even simpler. I have this fed from send 3, on fully wet, so as soon as I press the button, whatever was fed into the (muted) reverb is frozen and unmuted.

When you reverse the process, the frozen elements vanishes instantly, so I’ve added a second reverb to follow it, providing a controllable tail-off. Ideally, I’d like to trigger this by a foot-switch – may recycle the hold socket on the Roland PCR300 I’m using as a controller.