New Music Gear Monday: Tonestrum TRAVELER Doppler Effect Plugin

Anyone that’s ever tried to manually create a Doppler effect simulation will know that it’s way easier said than done. It seems like a little panning, automated EQ, pitch change and ambience and you’ll have it, but it’s way more complicated than that. That’s why the new Tonstrum TRAVELER plugin is so cool. It precisely models the acoustic phenomenon of the Doppler effect and provides a powerful and intuitive graphical path editor to determine a sound’s virtual movement.

A common example of Doppler shift is the change of pitch heard when a vehicle sounding a horn approaches and goes away from an observer. TRAVELER features a 2D path editor allowing you to precisely shape the motion path of the sound source. You can also go way beyond the standard Doppler effect though, as the plugin makes it possible to freely position the listener in relation to the path, providing some cool effects for music as well.

TRAVELER offers control over the speed of the sound source, the path length, and the overall doppler path duration, with accurate 64 bit modeling of doppler shift, distance based gain and air absorption filtering. It works as a live insert effect and offers enhanced Audio Suite functionality, where you can precisely synchronize the doppler path in timecode, seconds or bars and beats mode.

The plugin also comes with an onboard loop and granular sample player that allows synchronized playback to the doppler path. This makes it possible to play back the desired sound effect at different durations while keeping everything in perfect sync. After being processed by the doppler effect engine, TRAVELER features a powerful post effects section. The parameters of the post effect engine and the parameters of the granular sample player can modulated by the 4 individual multisegment LFOs that run in sync with the Doppler path duration. It also comes with sound effects and over 80 presets and samples that can serve as an ideal starting point.

Tonstrum TRAVELER is only for Mac OS X right now (VST, AU or AAX), but a Windows version is in the works. Its carries an introductory price of $179 ($229 when the sale is over), and there’s also a 7 day free trial available.

You can find out more details here, or watch the video below.